My trade website is down: who do I call? Four things can answer, and each one points at a different person
A customer sends you a screenshot at ten past eight on a Monday: where your website used to be, and a message asking whether you have packed it in. You open it on your own phone and get the same thing. On 9 September I ran 236 real UK trade domains off my own cold-call lead sheets through a check that records what each homepage sends back, and 30 returned something no customer could use.
The instinct is to ring whoever built it. Sometimes that is right. Just as often it is the slowest route available, because the thing that has failed is not the website, and the person who built the website has no access to it.
Spend two minutes working out what answered before you ring anybody. There are four possibilities, they point at four different people, and getting the first call wrong costs you a working day.
Find out what answered before you ring anyone. Nothing at all points at the domain or its DNS, and that is your registrar. A platform's own "site not found" page points at the account or the billing. An error page points at your host. A page that loads blank points at whoever built it. Of 236 UK trade sites I checked, 30 sat in one of those four states.
What answered is the only question that matters
"Down" is not one condition, it is four, and they have nothing in common except the blank look on your customer's phone. The fastest diagnostic a tradesman can run is to open the site on mobile data instead of his own broadband and read exactly what comes back.
Use mobile data rather than the office wifi: a local cache or a router will cheerfully show you yesterday's version of a site that has been gone since Friday. Then work down these four.
Thirty of 236 UK trade sites were in one of those four states
Across 236 real UK trade domains checked on 9 September 2026, 19 answered nothing at all, five returned a not-found error on the homepage, three returned a server error, and three answered successfully with a page too small to contain anything. That is 30 businesses, a shade worse than one in eight.
| What came back | Sites | What it points at |
|---|---|---|
| A normal page | 190 | Working |
| Nothing at all | 19 | Domain or DNS |
| A bot check instead of a page | 16 | Probably fine for a human |
| Not found on the homepage | 5 | Account or billing |
| Server error | 3 | Host or code |
| Success, but an empty page | 3 | Whoever built it |
Two caveats, because they cut against the headline. Each domain was requested once, so a site down for ten minutes counts the same as one gone for a year. And my checker is not a browser, so the 16 that returned a bot challenge are excluded from the 30: a real customer on a real phone would most likely have got through.
Nineteen answered nothing, and that is a registrar problem
No response at all means the request never reached a server. From the outside, a lapsed domain, DNS pointing at nowhere and a switched-off server are indistinguishable, which is exactly why people ring the wrong person.
This was the largest failure group, and the one where the web designer is least use. Your domain sits with a registrar, and in British trade work that is usually a Nominet registrar: of the same 236 domains, 189 are inside Nominet's .uk namespace and 47 outside it. Nominet's published position is a three-way relationship, contracting with the registrar through the .UK Registry-Registrar Agreement and with you through the .UK Registrant Terms and Conditions. Your designer is not a party to any of it.
Finding out who your registrar actually is
Look the domain up on the public registry record. You will probably not find your own name there: of 40 live Nominet lookups on these .co.uk domains, 39 were registered and not one published a registrant name. What the record does give you is the registrar line, and the registrar is the party with the obligation. Nominet's own WHOIS carries a notice that it "will cease on 9th of February 2027", with RDAP replacing it, so any guide telling you to run a WHOIS has a shelf life.
If the registrar will not engage, there is a route above them. Every Nominet registrar must publish a complaints procedure, and the model timescales are an acknowledgement within two working days, a response within ten, twenty working days to escalate and a final answer within a further ten. Outside the .uk namespace the equivalent is ICANN's contractual compliance route.
The renewal email you did not get. A domain rarely lapses by accident. It lapses because the renewal notice went to an address nobody has opened since 2019, often one a previous designer set up. When the site is back, the most valuable ten minutes you will spend is changing the contact address on the registrar account to one you read.
The five not-found pages were all the platform talking
All five homepages returning a not-found error were on builder platforms, and they came in matched pairs: the two Squarespace ones were byte-identical at 3,312 bytes, and the two Duda ones at 927 bytes. Identical pages are generated by the platform, which means your site is not the thing answering.
This is the most useful finding in the audit, because it converts a mystery into an errand. Two unrelated British businesses served a not-found page of exactly the same size, to the byte. Their websites did not fail identically at the same moment: they were not answering at all, and Squarespace was answering instead, with the page it serves for a domain pointed at a site that is unpublished, expired or never finished. The fifth was a Wix site, doing the same job.
Practically, that means stop debugging. Somebody needs to log into the account and find out whether the subscription lapsed, the card expired or the site was unpublished. The awkward part is that the account is frequently not in your name, and on resold platforms it may sit with an agency. What happens when the payments stop, and how quickly, is set out in what happens when you stop paying for your website.
Three answered with an error, and that is the host
A server error means the machine is running and the software on it is failing. Your host can see the log that says why. In most cases nobody else can.
The smallest group, three of 236, and the one that behaves as people expect a fault to behave: something changed, something broke, somebody can read an error. Ring the host, give them the domain and the time it started, and ask for the error log. If they say the server is healthy and the application is at fault, that is when it moves to whoever built it.
The worst one answers perfectly and shows nothing
Three sites returned a successful response carrying a body too small to be a web page, two of them at exactly 114 bytes and one at 4 bytes. Every uptime monitor pointed at those domains would have reported them healthy, because a monitor checks that the request succeeded rather than that a page came back.
Two of those three returned the same 114 bytes as each other, the signature of a holding page from a shared host rather than anything either business chose. A customer sees a white screen and leaves. The owner, if he checks at all, checks from the phone where the site is still in the cache, sees it load, and concludes the customer is confused.
This is the failure that runs for months, and the argument for the dullest habit in the trade: open your own website on mobile data, once a month, and look at it. Not the bookmark. The address a customer types. A site that has quietly emptied itself passes every automated check you could buy.
What to have written down before you ring anyone
The single biggest delay in getting a trade website back is not the fix, it is proving to a support desk that you are entitled to ask. Have these six things in a note on your phone before you need them.
After it comes back
A short outage does not cost you your position in search. Google re-crawls on its own schedule, and its published advice after a change is the URL Inspection tool for a handful of pages and a sitemap for a larger set. Down for days rather than hours, submit the sitemap and leave it alone. What actually survives when a site moves or changes hands is covered in what happens to your rankings when you move a site.
Who you ring when somebody looks after it
If you pay somebody to look after your website, the answer to "who do I call" should be one name and one number, and you should not have to run a triage to work out which. That is most of what the money is for.
I will be straight about the limits of this. Sites I build go down too: hosts have bad days and domains still need renewing. What you are buying is not a promise that nothing breaks, it is that the registrar account, the hosting and the site sit in one place, in your name, and that one person picks up. On a Sitework site the domain, hosting, SSL and backups are all inside the £50 every four weeks, with no build fee, so no renewal notice goes to somebody who stopped trading in 2023.
Three months minimum then rolling, your first payment back if you do not like the finished site, and at twelve months the website and domain are yours with no exit fee. If you are tied to somebody now, the published exit terms of six providers are compared in how to cancel a website contract in the UK, and an example of the replacement is on the bathroom fitter website page.