When your Wordpress site crashes... it really sucks.
I've been there before.
But there are certain things you can do to help minimize the damage that is done when your site crashes, and how to restore it.
Here are my top 5 things to do when your Wordpress site crashes.
1. Check to make sure it's really down. So use a different connection, like your phone or have a friend check the site for you. I use jetpack on WP to monitor if my site is down and I get an email if it is and another when it's back up. It's free too.
2. If the site is down, then call hosting support. I've had major issues with some hosting support where it can take days to get the issue resolved. I currently use Siteground which is more expensive than some other companies, but it's totally worth it. You can start chatting with a REAL tech that is an admin in about 10 secs. They can log onto your server and see what's up. Generally, you'll be able to defer to them.
3. Figure out the root issue. In my case, the site kept going down every couple days for several hours at a time. I didn't know what the issue was and neither did the tech support (from that bad, unmentioned company). They just told me to optimize for speed, which I already did—my site loaded in about 1 sec. SiteGround is way more helpful and provided better investigations.
4. If you're having trouble figuring out the root issue, have a look at your traffic. Is it slowly growing? If so, you may need to upgrade your hosting. It's not obvious, but going over some threshold of visitors may put too much load on your hosting resources. It depends on your specific installation of WP, theme, plugins, how many sites you're hosting, and so on. For me, just getting 1% more traffic one week, put me over that threshold, so WP was crashing and the result was the site not loading. Seriously, just that little bit more traffic. I upgraded to a better account over at SiteGround and everything was fine.
5. Do this before your site crashes...Have a DAILY backup of your site that is OFF the server. Most hosting accounts have autobackups and that's great, but they are normally on the same acct, just in a different folder. So I use ManageWP because it's about $2/month per site and they handle everything. AND, the biggest feature for me is you can migrate very easily to another hosting acct from ManageWP. It's a few clicks and that's it. You can also restore your site in a few clicks. In each case, it only takes a few seconds and it's great if you're non technical.
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DOUG CUNNINGTON, PMP writes about SEO, productivity, project management, and niche sites. His work has been featured all over the web, including Ahrefs, Empire Flippers, Niche Pursuits, Side Hustle Nation and more.
I am an internet marketer and a Project Management Professional (PMP, certified in 2008 by the Project Management Institute).