We built IsItWP’s free website uptime status checker to offer you the best way to analyze whether your website is down for everyone or just you.
What Is Uptime?
Uptime is a term used to describe the period that your website is available and operational. In technical terms, it’s the uninterrupted time your hosting server experiences. Usually, uptime is expressed as a percentage of the total available time, “99.95%”, for example.
Ideally, uptime should be at 100%. In order for the website to receive 100% uptime, then it means it was available and accessible all year long, 24/7, without any downtimes.
Let’s take a look at how your website uptime is calculated below. If you’d rather cut straight to the chase and dive into seeing how our Free Website Uptime Status Checker works, go for it instead.
Website Uptime Calculation
Uptime is calculated based on the number of hours that your web hosting server is available during a given period of time.
Here’s how uptime of your web hosting server is calculated:
The total number of hours your website is available divided by the total number of hours per year multiplied by 100.
That means, uptime = (Total available time/total time per year) x 100
Let’s take a look at an example. We know that there are 365 days per year so in terms of hours, there are a total of 365 x 24 = 8760 hours. And if there were 4 hours of downtime per year, then the calculation would be:
(8756 / 8760) x 100 = 99.95%
Factors that Affect Your Website Uptime
There are a lot of factors that can affect your web hosting server’s uptime including:
- Security threats
- Hardware failures
- Natural disaster
- Human error
- Backup disk corruption
- Power outage
This is why no web hosting provider can guarantee 100% uptime. However, anything below 99.9% is considered unreliable.
To compare the uptime of different hosting providers, take a look at our complete web hosting review.
How Does IsItWP Uptime Checker Work?
IsItWP’s free website uptime status checker is the best way to analyze whether your website is down for everyone or just you.
Here’s how our uptime checker works:
1. Submit Your URL to Our Uptime Checker Tool
To test your website availability, all you have to do is enter your site’s URL in our Website Uptime Status Checker tool above and click the Analyze Website button.
2. Our Tool Monitors Your Site’s Uptime
After your website URL is being submitted, our free website uptime status checker tool checks whether your website is available.
3. You Get the Result
After the website availability test, you’ll get the uptime status result immediately. Alongside, you can also find out the following details of the site you’re testing.
- The latest screenshot of the site
- Title of the site
- Hosting provider where the site is hosted
- Whois info of the domain name
Website Downtime and Consequences
In order to understand the importance of website uptime, we need to discuss what happens if your site goes down for a few minutes.
Downtime Sabotages Your Online Reputation
Nothing sabotages your online reputation faster than having your website being unreachable for your potential visitors.
Your customer expects your website to stay operational around the clock. When your website is down, it hurts the trust of your audience, and they see that your website is unreliable. If you experience frequent outages, then it’s in your best interest to switch over to a reliable WordPress hosting provider.
Downtime costs you sales and revenue
Website outage directly translates into lost sales and revenue. Your customers won’t be able to purchase your products as long as the outage lasts.
Impacts Your SEO
Having frequent downtimes can also affect your website SEO negatively.
When you have frequent downtimes, Google sees that your website is unreliable. Obviously, they don’t want to send users to a website that is unreliable because it provides their users a bad experience.
My Website Is Down. What Should I Do Next?
Is your website not working for you?
Simply follow the step by step guide below to figure out the reason for the outage and get the site back online.
Verify Yourself – Is It Really Down Right Now?
First things first, before you conclude that your site is down, it’s worth taking a moment to ask yourself, is it down for everyone or just me?
Using our free website uptime status checker is the best way to verify if your website is actually down for everyone or just you. To conduct the website availability test, all you have to do is specify your website URL and hit the Analyze Website button.
That’s it!
Once your URL is submitted, our system will ping your site and tell you whether your site is available or not.
If Your Site is Down Only for You…
Is your site available for everyone but not for you?
One of the common reasons for not being able to reach your website could be a DNS issue. If you’ve recently updated your DNS and you can’t access your site with your local computer, then you might want to check if the new DNS has updated in your location.
Head over to a DNS propagation checker like WhatsMyDNS.net and perform a DNS lookup to verify if the new DNS has updated. The checker lets you check your domain name’s current IP address and DNS record information against multiple name servers located in different parts of the world.
If your DNS has updated in your location, but you’re still unable to visit your site, then try clearing your browser cache. This enables you to see the most recent version of your website.
If Your Site is Down for Everyone…
Is your site not available for everyone? Then follow the step by step guide below.
1. Check With Your Web Hosting Provider
There are several reasons why a website may be down.
Get in touch with your web host customer support about your site being down. Let them know when you’ve noticed the issue and ask if there were any problems with the servers.
You might also want to ask your hosting provider to check your logs for anything suspicious. A reputable hosting provider will always help you out if they find anything unusual and even provide suggestions to fix it.
If you’re facing frequent outages, then you might consider moving your website to a reliable WordPress hosting provider.
The main problem with reviewing a host on their uptime is that you have no real way to test their guarantee. When your web hosting provider says that they provide 99.9% uptime, you need to blindly trust them.
To sort out this problem for our users and to figure out whether web hosting services live up to their uptime promises, we’ve created test WordPress sites with all major hosting providers and added dummy content to it. This way our test sites look and feel like typical WordPress websites. Then in each site, we’ve conducted a few different server availability and speed tests to figure out whether the site is capable enough to handle traffic surge during peak load time.
We’ve also recorded how each website responds to server requests from different geographical locations and also analyzed if there were any downtime during the test.
If you’re looking to switch over to a reliable hosting provider, we strongly recommend you to take a look at our complete web hosting review and compare uptime of different hosting providers.
2. Scan Your Website for Malware and Fix It
If you suspect that your site’s being hacked or injected with malware, then you might want to scan your WordPress website with our Free WordPress Security Scanner.
To follow security best practices, you might also want to check out this ultimate WordPress security guide.
3. Confirm Your Domain Registration is Paid
Last but not least, confirm if your domain registration fee is paid. If it’s not, then please go ahead and pay the fee, so your website can be online quickly.
Below are a few tips to make sure you don’t forget paying your registration fee on time.
- Set up auto renewal: Enabling auto renewal ensures hassle-free registration fee payment.
- Pay several years in advance: If you don’t prefer enabling auto renewal, you might pay several years in advance.
- Use current email address: Make sure to provide your current email address to your domain registrar. This ensures that you receive all email notifications on time.
Without a doubt, uptime is one of the biggest factors you need to check when choosing a web hosting provider for your site.
If you’re just starting out, then we recommend choosing Bluehost. They’re officially recommended by WordPress, and they’re offering our users a free domain name, free SSL, and over 60% off on WordPress hosting.
Get started with Bluehost today!
You can also read our complete Bluehost review.
That’s all. We hope you liked our free website uptime status tool.
