WordPress "This Site Can't Be Reached": Diagnose & Fix (2026)

First: visit downforeveryoneorjustme.com or isitdownrightnow.com and enter your domain. If the site's up for others, it's a DNS or ISP issue on your end.

If it's down for everyone, the outage is at the DNS layer, the CDN layer (Cloudflare), or the host itself. The next three checks tell you which.

Open terminal and run: dig yourdomain.com A +short

If you get an IP back, DNS is working — the problem is between DNS and the server (host, CDN). If you get nothing or a delegation error, DNS is broken.

Log into your DNS host (Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Namecheap). Confirm the A record points at your server's IP. After a host migration, this is the #1 cause of "site can't be reached" — DNS still points at the old server.

cloudflarestatus.com shows real-time incidents. If Cloudflare is having a regional outage, your site is unreachable through them even if the origin is fine.

Temporary workaround: log into Cloudflare, disable the orange cloud on your A record (turn it grey) — this bypasses Cloudflare and serves directly from origin. Takes about 5 minutes to propagate.

Get your server's real IP from your host panel. Try: curl -I http://<your-server-ip> -H "Host: yourdomain.com"

If you get an HTTP response, the server is up — the issue is between the browser and the server (DNS, Cloudflare, firewall). If you get a connection error, the server itself is down. Time to contact your host.

If DNS is correct, Cloudflare is fine, and the origin isn't responding — your host has a problem. Check their status page and open a ticket. Most reputable hosts publish incidents at status.<hostname>.com.

This is often the fastest path to resolution. Hosts see the outage before you do and are already working on it.

If your host is unresponsive and your site's been down for hours, we do emergency migrations off a broken host — usually starting on a fresh server within 60 minutes. Migration rescue starts at $299 depending on site complexity.