Free Website Uptime Checker
Enter any domain below to check whether a website is up or down right now. We run the check from our own server, so you will see instantly whether a site is down for everyone or just you, along with its response time and HTTP status.
What our uptime checker shows you
Most “is it down” tools only tell you up or down. Because this one checks from our own servers, you get the full picture:
- Whether the site is up or down for everyone, since we reach it from our server and not your browser.
- The response time in milliseconds, an early warning for when a server is starting to struggle.
- The exact HTTP status code it returned, such as 200 OK, 403, or 500.
- Whether the site loads over HTTPS with a valid SSL certificate.
- A live screenshot of the page, so you can see exactly what it is serving right now.
Is the website down, or is it just you?
If the checker shows a site is up, it responded normally from our server, which means it is online for everyone. If a page still will not load for you, the problem is almost always on your end: your internet connection, your DNS, a browser extension, or a stale cache.
If the checker shows a site is down with no status code, our server could not reach it either, so it is very likely down for everyone, not just you. If it shows down with a 401, 403, or 429 code, read the table below first, because the site may be online and simply refusing automated checks.
How our uptime checker works
When you enter a domain, we request its homepage from our server. Anything after the domain, such as a path or query string, is ignored, so the check always answers “is this site reachable” rather than “does this one page work.”
- We try HTTPS first and verify the SSL certificate.
- If the certificate is invalid, we retry without verification, so a site with an expired certificate shows as up with an SSL warning instead of down.
- If HTTPS fails completely, we fall back to plain HTTP.
- We follow up to five redirects and give up after 10 seconds.
A final status code from 200 to 399 is marked up. Everything else, including 4xx and 5xx codes, timeouts, and DNS failures, is marked down, and the result card shows the code or error so you can see why.
What each result means
The status code or error message tells you far more than the up or down verdict. These are the results you are most likely to see and what to do about each one. The example errors are real responses our checker returned in testing on November 8, 2026.
| Result | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Up, 200 OK | The site answered normally. It is online for everyone. | If it will not load for you, flush your DNS, try another network, or disable your VPN. |
| Up, 301 or 302 | The site redirected, for example from http to https or to a www address, and the final page loaded. | Nothing. This is normal. |
| Up, SSL invalid | The site loads, but its certificate is expired, self-signed, or issued for a different domain. In testing, expired.badssl.com came back up with an invalid certificate. | Visitors will see a browser security warning. If it is your site, renew or reissue the certificate with your host. |
| Down, 401 or 403 | The server answered but refused our request. This is usually a firewall or bot protection blocking automated traffic, not an outage. In testing, reddit.com returned 403 Forbidden while it was online. | Open the site in your browser. If it loads, it is up. If it is your site and you want it checkable, look at your firewall or bot-protection rules. |
| Down, 429 | Too many requests. The site is rate limiting. | Wait a minute and check again. |
| Down, 500 | The server hit an error while building the page. On WordPress this is often a PHP fatal error from a plugin or theme. | See our guide to the WordPress critical error. |
| Down, 502, 503, or 504 | A proxy, CDN, or load balancer could not get a good answer from the server behind it, or the site is overloaded or in maintenance mode. | Usually temporary. Check the host or CDN status page and try again in a few minutes. |
| Down, “Could not resolve host” | DNS has no address for the domain. The domain may have expired, its DNS records may be broken, or it may be mistyped. In testing, a made-up domain returned “cURL error 6: Could not resolve host.” | Check the spelling, then check the domain’s registration and DNS records. |
| Down, timed out or connection refused | Nothing answered within 10 seconds, or the server actively refused the connection. The server is likely offline or overloaded. | If it is your site, contact your host. It is almost certainly down for everyone. |
What to do if a website is down
If a site you are trying to reach is down, work through these quick checks:
- Reload and wait. Refresh the page, then try again in a few minutes. Many outages are brief.
- Test another network. Switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data, or the other way around. If it loads on one but not the other, the issue is local to you.
- Clear your DNS cache. An outdated DNS record can make a live site look dead, and flushing your DNS often fixes it.
- Check the status page. Most large services post outages on a status page or their social accounts.
If it is your own website that is down, the cause is usually the host, a plugin or theme conflict, or a server error. Start with your hosting provider’s status page, then check for a white screen of death or an error establishing a database connection, the two most common WordPress outages. If the site is slow rather than fully down, our guide to speeding up WordPress can help, and moving to reliable WordPress hosting prevents many outages in the first place.
What is website uptime?
Website uptime is the share of time a site is reachable and serving pages, usually written as a percentage over a month or a year. Hosts and monitoring services quote it as a number of nines, and the gap between them is bigger than it looks:
| Uptime | Downtime per month | Downtime per year |
|---|---|---|
| 99% | About 7.3 hours | About 3.65 days |
| 99.5% | About 3.65 hours | About 43.8 hours |
| 99.9% | About 43.8 minutes | About 8.76 hours |
| 99.95% | About 21.9 minutes | About 4.38 hours |
| 99.99% | About 4.4 minutes | About 52.6 minutes |
Figures use a 365-day year and an average month of one twelfth of that. A host’s uptime guarantee is only worth what it pays out when it misses, which is often very little. We compared what seven hosts actually credit in our breakdown of WordPress hosting uptime guarantees.
Downtime costs visitors and sales, and long outages can also affect search. Google’s documentation says that 5xx and 429 errors make its crawlers slow down, and that already indexed URLs are kept for a while but eventually dropped if the errors continue.
One-off check vs ongoing monitoring
The checker above is a spot check. It answers “is it reachable right now,” which is exactly what you want when a site will not load. What it cannot do is tell you about the outage that starts at 3am while you are asleep, or show you a site’s uptime history.
For that you want continuous monitoring: a service that checks your site every few minutes from outside your network, alerts you the moment it stops responding, and keeps a record of every outage. It is worth setting up on any site that earns money, and the free tiers are generous. These are the free plans as listed on each provider’s site on November 8, 2026:
| Service | Free plan | Check interval | Good fit for |
|---|---|---|---|
| UptimeRobot | 50 monitors, no credit card | 5 minutes | Freelancers watching many small or client sites |
| StatusCake | 10 uptime monitors | 5 minutes | A handful of sites |
| Better Stack | 10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page | Not listed for the free plan (paid plans go down to 30 seconds) | Sites that also want a public status page |
| Jetpack Downtime Monitor | Free with the Jetpack plugin, no plan required | 5 minutes | A single WordPress site already running Jetpack |
| Uptime Kuma | Open source, unlimited monitors | You choose | Developers who can self-host it on their own server |
Jetpack’s monitor is the easiest option on WordPress since it runs from the plugin you may already have. Per its documentation, it sends an HTTP HEAD request to your homepage every five minutes and treats any status of 400 or higher as down, then alerts the WordPress.com account connected to Jetpack. Uptime Kuma is free and actively maintained, but it needs its own server, ideally one that is not the server hosting the site it watches.
One setup tip whichever you choose: point the monitor at a normal page that actually runs WordPress, such as your homepage, rather than a static file. A static file can keep returning 200 while PHP or the database is failing, so you would never get the alert that matters.
Frequently asked questions
Is this website down checker free?
Yes. There is no signup and no limit for normal use. A light rate limit stops automated abuse, so if you run dozens of checks in a minute you may be asked to wait briefly.
What does “down for everyone” mean?
It means the website did not respond to our server, not just to your browser. When a site is down for everyone, the problem is on the website’s side, and there is nothing you can do except wait for the owner to fix it.
Why is a website down for me but not for others?
If the checker says a site is up but you still cannot reach it, the cause is local: your network or ISP, a DNS issue, a VPN or firewall, a browser extension, or a cached copy of the page. Trying another device or network usually confirms it.
Why does the checker say a site is down when it loads for me?
Look at the status code. A 401, 403, or 429 means the site answered but blocked our server, which is common on large sites and on sites behind strict bot protection. The site is up for real visitors. Only a missing status code, a timeout, or a 5xx error points to a real outage.
Can I check a website’s uptime history or how long it has been down?
Not with a one-off checker. It only sees the moment you run it. To find out how long a site has been down, check its official status page, which large services use to post incident start times. For your own site, set up one of the monitoring services above, which log every outage with its start time and duration from then on.
Can I check a specific page instead of the whole site?
No. The checker tests the domain’s homepage and ignores any path you paste in. If the homepage is up but one page fails, the issue is with that page, not the server.
What is a good response time?
For a single check from one server, a few hundred milliseconds is healthy. In testing, google.com answered in 232 ms and smartwp.com in 117 ms. Our number covers the whole request, including the connection and SSL handshake, so it runs higher than time to first byte. For comparison, Google’s web.dev guidance says a good TTFB is 0.8 seconds or less. Response times that keep climbing can be an early sign a server is overloaded, sometimes before it goes fully down.
Can I check whether my own WordPress site is down?
Yes. Enter your domain above to see how your site responds from outside your own network. If it comes back down, check your host first, then look for a white screen, a critical error message, or a database connection error.
