If your site is unreachable, there could be many different reasons why but usually only one is the culprit, figuring out and resolving it issue is important!
If the site isn’t loading at all, resulting in one of the following:
- A Blank Page.
- A White Page with a string of text displayed and/or error messages.
- A “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” message displaying instead of your site.
- A Broken Page i.e. some elements seem out of place, overlapping, or if there is missing content thereby causing the site to display oddly.
Any of the above-listed issues could be related to a plugin on your site, please contact our Help Desk, or email us at helpdesk@northstarmarketing.com so we can troubleshoot the issue further.
There are situations where something specific to the end-users particular device or setup may have resulted in an intermittent issue with the site, meaning that: In some situations, an issue can be client-side versus server-side i.e. the issue may not have been on the site/server but on the actual device (or middle-man per se such as a modem/router and related firewalls) used to access the site. Anytime you experience issues accessing your site, or anyone for that matter, even if it’s on a different site other than yours – you can troubleshoot access issues like this by testing:
- Clear your browser’s cache! Sometimes the site isn’t down at all but rather not wanting to load properly due to conflicts within your cache. You can use Google to search for “How to clear (your browser’s name here) browser cache”, choose one of the many guides, and follow the directions to clear your browser cache. Since many different internet browsers exist it’s best to search for your specific browser to see how the cache is cleared.
- Try disabling Ad-Blocker scripts and browser plugins, sometimes these detect “false-positives” or detect some javascript and other snippets of code as malicious when in fact they’re not and thus the site or part of it could be blocked by them. You can typically exclude a site or disable them temporarily to visit and interact with the site.
- Try temporarily disabling your Firewall / Disable Anti-Virus or Security Shields for 10mins or temporarily (don’t forget to re-enable when you’re done testing) to ensure the site isn’t being blocked by your firewall software.
- Try accessing from a different device. Sometimes security software on some devices can be the issue.
- Try accessing from a different Network. If you can access another Wi-Fi connection try that or alternatively turn Wi-Fi off on your phone (don’t forget to re-enable when you’re done testing) and attempt to access the site presenting the issue from your Mobile Network instead.
- Check to see if the site is actually down, meaning an issue on the server or with the domain/hosting. There are many free tools to check online, here is a link to Down.com where you can check the current status of your site.
Please Note: While these sites do work, there are some situations where they can also report a false-positive i.e. show the site as down when in fact it’s not down, but rather not loading correctly*.
*To Explain: Sometimes a service or php module on a server could “hiccup” and the server can still be online but showing as not due to a service not running and you can determine this by performing an “uptime” check. - If all else fails, this could ultimately be a bad “hop” which is an access point in a sense. To Explain: A Hop is basically a different server used to ultimately show your site, when you type in www.example.com it searches for the site then loads it by connecting through various servers (referred to as a hop) and basically it connects the dots in a sense. If one of these “hops” is down, it stops there and doesn’t connect to the other points required before finally loading the site. Here is a guide showing how to perform a Traceroute which we may ask you to perform if all else fails, to determine if a bad hop is the culprit when it comes to access issues. Usually, this isn’t too common so it’s checked more so, as a last resort.
Very rarely some experience issues when accessing a site, most times we can see entries in the error logs and such that may indicate what occurred or at least lead us in the right direction to possibly find the culprit. If none of the above tests result in the ability to access the site, please submit a support ticket immediately.