My website is not working
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"Not working" covers four completely different problems with four different fixes, and the expensive mistake is paying to solve the wrong one. Work down this page in order. Every check is free, most take under a minute, and the first one that fails is your answer.
Website not working: is it down for everyone, or only for you?
Do this before anything else, because roughly half of "my website is down" is a local problem and costs nothing to rule out.
- Open it on your phone with wifi switched off. A different network and a different device at once. If it loads, the site is fine and your office network, router or browser cache is not.
- Try it in a private window. This removes extensions and cached files, which are between you and a working site more often than anything on the server.
- Check from outside. A third-party checker such as downforeveryoneorjustme.com loads your address from somewhere that is not your desk.
If it is genuinely down for everyone, the cause is almost always one of three dated things — and all three are public, so you can check them yourself in the next two minutes.
Second: has something simply expired?
| What expired | What you see | How to check, free |
|---|---|---|
| The domain | Nothing loads, or a parking page full of adverts | A WHOIS lookup at lookup.icann.org shows the expiry date and the registrant |
| The certificate | "Your connection is not private", a red warning | Click the padlock in the address bar; the date is in there |
| The hosting | A suspension notice, or a blank page | Your host's billing email, and the card on file |
A lapsed domain is the one to treat as urgent rather than annoying. It is recoverable for a window after expiry and then it is not, and the WHOIS record also tells you something worth knowing regardless — whether the domain is registered to you or to whoever built the site. If it is the second, read who owns your website before you do anything else.
Third: has it been hacked?
Two free checks, both authoritative, neither requiring any technical knowledge.
- Google's Safe Browsing report at transparencyreport.google.com — type your address and it says whether Google currently considers the site unsafe. This is the same signal behind the full-page red warning visitors get.
- Search Console, if it is connected, has a Security Issues report that names what was found and where.
If you are on WordPress, understand the shape of the risk before paying anyone. Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2025 reports that "7,966 new security vulnerabilities were found in the WordPress ecosystem in 2024" — 96% of them in plugins, 4% in themes, seven in core itself — and that "in 2024, 33% of vulnerabilities were not fixed in time for public disclosure". A clean-up that does not also reduce the plugin count is a clean-up you will buy again.
A hacked site is the one case where speed matters more than price. The longer a warning sits on your listing the longer it takes to clear after the fix, because the flag is removed on a review cycle rather than the moment you clean it.
Fourth: is it working, but producing nothing?
This is the most common version of "not working", and it is not a fault. The site loads. It does exactly what it was built to do. What it is not doing is generating enquiries — and that is a different problem, with a different fix, and rebuilding is not automatically it.
| Symptom | What it usually means | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| No visitors at all | The site is not indexed, or ranks for nothing | Why your site is not showing on Google |
| Visitors, no calls | The number is not visible, or the form asks too much | Your own phone, on the actual homepage |
| High bounce rate | Slow on mobile, or the page does not match the search | PageSpeed Insights |
| Form submissions vanish | Notification email going to spam or a dead address | Submit it yourself and wait ten minutes |
Do the cheapest test first, and do it on your own phone rather than a desktop: open your homepage and see whether you can find the phone number without scrolling. A great many "the website does not work" complaints end there.
What does it cost to fix?
Anyone quoting before they have looked is guessing, but the bands are honest enough to plan with.
| Problem | Realistic cost |
|---|---|
| Expired domain or certificate | A renewal. Often under $50, sometimes $0 |
| Hosting suspended | The outstanding invoice |
| Hacked site cleaned | Hundreds to low thousands, and it can recur |
| Speed and mobile work | Hourly. Get the hours estimated in writing first |
| Not generating enquiries | $0 to test. Only then decide whether to spend |
For context on any hourly figure you are quoted: Clutch puts United States agency rates at $100–$149 an hour (September 2026), and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median pay for employed web developers and digital designers at $47.85 an hour, May 2025 (bls.gov).
Can you fix mine?
Usually not, and we would rather say so on this page than after an invoice. We do not repair sites we did not build — we rebuild, then maintain — because taking over somebody else's plugin stack means inheriting a problem we cannot price and cannot promise to keep fixed.
What we do instead: rebuild your homepage free, from the content already published on your existing site, so you can see the alternative before any money moves. $299 only if you approve it, then $69 a month with hosting, maintenance, nightly backups, uptime monitoring and 30 minutes of edits included. No plugins to break is not a slogan; it is why the maintenance price is what it is.
If the site is fundamentally sound and you want it repaired rather than replaced, fix my website walks through the individual faults and what each one takes, and website maintenance covers what a care plan should include so this does not happen again.
Common questions
- Why is my website not working?
- Work down four questions in order, because they cost nothing and they rule each other out. Is it down for everyone or only you — check from mobile data with wifi off. Has the domain or the certificate expired — both are dated and both are public. Has it been flagged as hacked — Google's Safe Browsing report tells you in seconds. Or is it up and simply not producing enquiries, which is not a fault at all and needs a different fix.
- My website is up but gets no enquiries. Is that a fault?
- No, and treating it as one wastes money. A site that loads is doing what it was built to do; whether anyone can find it, and whether they act when they arrive, are separate problems. Check the phone number is visible without scrolling on a phone, that the form has four fields and not twelve, and that the site is indexed at all. Rebuilding a site that nobody visits solves nothing.
- How much does it cost to fix a broken website?
- It depends entirely on what is broken, and anyone quoting before they have looked is guessing. An expired domain or certificate is a renewal, often under $50. A hacked site is a clean-up and can run into the hundreds or thousands. A slow site is work, charged by the hour. Fablence does not repair sites we did not build — we rebuild and then maintain — so the honest answer here is diagnosis first, and the diagnosis is free to do yourself with the checks on this page.