Having your website down can be a stressful situation. If you believe your site is down, there are a few steps you can take to troubleshoot and hopefully resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Helpful Terminology

  • A domain name is what you type into your browser to visit a specific website. For example, the domain name for Wired Impact is wiredimpact.com.
  • The domain name system (usually referred to as DNS) serves as the phonebook of the internet. DNS records handle translating domain names like nonprofit.org into a long string of numbers, called an IP address, that your computer uses to show you a website. This way, when people want to view your site, they never have to worry about remembering a bunch of random numbers.
  • The domain registrar (also known only as a registrar) is the company where you most likely purchased your domain and where you can change your domain’s settings. Two popular registrars are Namecheap and GoDaddy.
  • A cache is a dedicated storage space that collects temporary data to help websites, browsers and apps load more quickly.

Error Messages

When your website is down, these are some of the errors that your browser might display: 

These are a few questions that you can ask yourself to determine the possible causes.

Is this a global issue?

If you’re not able to access your website, the first step is to determine whether the reason is a global issue or something unique to your site.

The fastest way to find out if a global issue is impacting the whole Wired Impact platform is to visit these links:

If these sites also show the same error message, that suggests a global issue is affecting all of our sites, and it’s likely we’re already working on fixing it.

If you notice this, you can contact us at help@wiredimpact.com. We’ll keep you posted about what’s going on and let you know as soon as it’s been resolved.

Is your domain expired?

If those sites are working fine, then it’s likely the issue is only affecting your site. In that case, the most common reason is that the domain has expired. This typically occurs when the credit card linked to the domain payment fails (and hasn’t been updated). 

To check if your domain has expired, follow these steps:

  1. Visit https://lookup.icann.org
Screenshot of the Registration data lookup tool
  1. Search your domain without “www” at the beginning. The domain will look like “nonprofit.org”.
  2. Under the “Domain Information” section, find the Registry Expiration date.
  3. If the date has passed, then the domain is expired.
Screenshot of the domain information. highlighting the Registry Expiration date

If the domain is expired, you’ll need to renew it with your domain provider.

To confirm where your domain is held, scroll down to the “Registrar Information” section within the same place you looked up the expiration date and find the name of your provider.

Screenshot of the registrar information, highlighting the name.

Are you the only one seeing this issue?

If your domain hasn’t expired, then you might be running into a caching issue, or the website may be blocked by an internal network. These problems are common and relatively easy to solve.

Start by trying to access your website from other browsers and devices. If the website loads fine in other browsers (like Firefox, Safari or Edge) or other devices (like a cellphone or another computer), here are a few things you can try:

  • Clear the cache within the browser and device that’s not working. Here are some guides about how to do that in the most popular browsers:
  • Turn off the WiFi on your phone and check if you can access the website using cellular data. If you can, then it’s possible that your network is blocking the website. In this case, the best thing to do is to reach out to your IT company to figure out what’s going on.

Contact Wired Impact

If you’ve followed these steps and are still encountering issues, please get in touch with us. You can send us a message at help@wiredimpact.com, and we’ll hop in as soon as possible to help you figure out the issue.

Please note that if your email address uses your website’s domain, we might not receive your emails. If you’re concerned your emails won’t be received, you can contact us using another email address that’s not using your domain (like Gmail or Outlook).

Please let us know what steps you’ve already taken when you reach out. This will save valuable time as we attempt to figure out the issue and help you get your site back online. 

You can use the following email template to speed up the process of contacting us:


Subject: Urgent: [Organization Name] website is down

Hi Wired Impact,

My website is down. I’ve attached a screenshot of the message I’m seeing.

Here are the steps I’ve already taken:

  • Verified if I can access the site from different browsers and devices.
  • Cleared the cache of the browser.
  • Tried another network connection.
  • Verified that the domain is still active.

Nothing has worked so far. Please let me know what other steps I should follow on my end or if there’s other information I need to provide at this point.

Thank you.


Still Have Questions?

The quickest way to get support is to reach out to us within your website’s admin dashboard. Log into your website and then fill out the Request Help form. You’ll hear back from us within one business day.