Website failures – how to deal with them?

When you see the infamous white screen of death or DNS server failure message instead of the familiar interface, it’s a sign that our website isn’t working correctly. What could be the cause, and how to deal with the failure?

Incorrectly set time on the computer.

This is fine related to the website itself. Still, an incorrectly set date and time makes it impossible to establish communication provided by the SSL certificate – making any website whose address begins with HTTPS will be unreachable to us. In most cases, your computer’s clock automatically syncs when connected to the Internet, but you can manually change the date or time. A less common cause of this failure is damage to the computer’s internal battery, which causes the device not to track the correct passage of time, which translates into a conflict with the SSL certificate.

Website update

Modifying or introducing new scripts on the page can lead to a whole range of errors, covering relatively minor issues – such as formatting, display, and operation of individual elements – or leading to a complete paralysis of the site. In this case, you should check recently changed components, plugins, and scripts, or restore the previous site version, if you have a backup copy.

Non-payment of domain/hosting

Contrary to appearances, failure to pay is a common cause of loss of access to the website. The screen may read “This site is unreachable” or “Unable to find DNS server” – although in the latter case, an overly aggressive antivirus system or incorrect DNS setting on the computer may be involved. Problems with the payment may occur when an intermediary takes care of it, or the account we use for regular transfers needs more funds when charging. Although the website cannot be displayed, our data is secure, and we usually have 30 to 70 days to pay. Posting the amount will restore the website to its previous state, but you must remember that after the expiry of the protection period, the data will be irretrievably deleted. We will encounter similar symptoms in the case of unpaid hosting, but in addition to a non-working website, the FTP server and the mailbox paired with it will be turned off.

No connection or difficult contact with the server

Unfortunately, we can do little in this case because the problem lies with the service provider. The lack of access to the site or the long loading time of the site manifests issues with the server. If you observe these symptoms while other pages load without problems, you should inform Wordpress support.

The hacker or virus attack

Unfortunately, the symptoms of this type of activity may be challenging to determine because the extent of damage is related to the style and size of interference on our side. The attack may be aimed at taking over the website, redirecting visitors to a new address, or stealing data – both the website content itself and data, e.g., about customers. In some cases, it is enough to restore the website to an older version – which the hosting company can help us with others, and it is necessary to re-upload the data or thoroughly check the files on the website. Sometimes it may be necessary to set up a website from scratch or carry out work that requires the presence of an expert.

Updating or having issues with your content management system (CMS)

WordPress is responsible for serving almost 15% of the most visited websites on the web and is the basis of 34% of all websites, which makes it a platform of choice. This also means that relatively often – if only for the sake of statistics – we will encounter problems when using this system. Message 503 Service Unavailable and the so-called. The white screen of death is a sight that occurs when there are server problems or no available memory. Other causes of a malfunctioning website include malfunctioning plugins or a website theme. These problems are relatively easy to fix using debug mode, and while WordPress is not very difficult to use, you need to have a basic understanding of how the system works to track down the correct lines of code.