A website crash occurs when a website fails to load properly, or when information on a website does not display correctly. Often a website crash will appear as a blank screen or an error code message. Website crashes can be very harmful to businesses. In the time that your website is down you could be losing visitors to your site, or customers for your business. That is why you will want the problem fixed immediately.
There can be many different reasons why a website might crash, but knowing why the crash occurred is an important part of being able to fix it quickly.
1. Trouble With Updates
Your website might be crashing because there is trouble with its updates — either it is in need of an update or a recent update is incompatible.
A website that is out-of-date can have bugs or might seem glitchy, reducing the user experience. It can also become more vulnerable to malicious attacks or malware.
How you update your website will depend on the content management system (CMS) you use. You should check your CMS for any new updates and make sure that you are using the latest version. If you are running your website through a CMS such as WordPress, you should be able to turn on automatic updates for your website.
If your website is up-to-date but the updates are incompatible for one reason or another, you might have to downgrade to a previous version of your CMS or use a previous backup of your website — this is why it’s important to always create backups for your website before making any new changes.
2. Problems With Code
Broken code is one of the most common reasons a website might crash.
If you made any new changes to your website just before it crashed, then there is a good chance it is because of the code. Another indication that broken code is responsible for your website crash is if you are seeing lines of code on your website where they shouldn’t be.
Website code can be very fragile. Your website will need all of its code to be 100% correct or it won’t work properly, even a very small problem or typo can cause a website to crash.
To help avoid coding issues, you might like to utilise a staging environment — essentially a copy of your website that is not live — so you can test certain changes and see whether they work properly before you implement them.
3. Too Much Traffic
Your website might have crashed because too many people are trying to access it at the same time.
Depending on your website, the problem may not just be the number of viewers, but it might also be what they are doing. Many websites require people to click tabs, add things to a cart, search or save items, and more. Simply put, if your website is trying to do too many things at the same time for too many visitors, it can crash. How many people can visit your website at once and how many tasks it can do simultaneously will be determined by your website’s hosting provider.
If you are regularly experiencing issues due to website traffic, you might consider upgrading your website’s bandwidth.
4. Plugin Issues
Plugins are software extensions that can be added to your website to improve its functionality or capability, allowing them to do more without having to make drastic changes to code.
For most people, plugins are quick and easy to install, with many benefits. Most companies will use plugins to customise the look of the website, or to insert useful tools for users. The most common plugins include social media feed plugins, calendar plugins, and Google review plugins.
Plugins can be a very common source for website crashes; even those from reputable companies can still have issues. A plugin may be incompatible with your website, or multiple plugins may clash with one another.
Thankfully, if a crash is caused by plugin issues, it should be relatively simple to fix. Either remove the plugin or plugins causing the issue, and things should return to normal.
5. Expired Domain
Your website might also crash if the domain it’s using has expired.
Every website has its own domain — it’s the address that people use to access your website. Domains do expire though, and you have to renew them to get things up and running again.
You likely have some experience with registering a domain from when you created your website initially. If not, that’s okay, there are plenty of easy guides online that can help you.
You can also set your domain to automatically renew, which should avoid this issue altogether
6. Hosting or Server Error
Another reason your website might be crashing is issues with the website’s hosting or server provider. This could be the reason if you have not otherwise made any changes to your website at all, and the crash seems to have happened without warning.
Your website crash might be the result of your website’s hosting provider running maintenance, updating their systems, or even having troubles of their own. Typically in this case your hosting provider will make contact and advise you of the crash.
Unfortunately if your website is crashing because of an error with the host or the server, then there isn’t much you can do but wait for them to fix the problem on their end.
Website crashes can be extremely infuriating, but fortunately, they are often relatively simple to fix. If you are confident in managing your own site, you can likely handle these issues on your own. If not, you might like to engage third party website support and maintenance to help you keep things on track.