If you’re unable to load your WordPress.com website or admin dashboard, a few possible issues could be causing it. This guide explains the most common scenarios and how you can resolve them.
If your site is offline, showing the wrong site, or showing errors when you try to visit your site as a member of the public, your site’s domain name address may be the issue. If you’re using a domain with your website (i.e., not the free .wordpress.com site address), domain problems are most commonly caused by an issue with your subscription or a DNS configuration error.
Visit our guide to learn how to resolve common domain errors.
If your site suddenly looks different than expected, your plan subscription may have expired. Review the purchases in your account to make sure your site has an active plan and that your plan is associated with the correct site.
For sites with plugins enabled, an expired plan will cause all plugins, custom themes, and any content added through them to be removed. You’ll also no longer be able to add plugins or custom themes to your site unless you upgrade again. To resolve this, you can follow this guide to restore your site to the way it was before the site plan expired.
In a situation where you can’t reach your website via a browser, you can confirm if it’s down for just you or for everyone by inputting your website address into this tool:
You can also check on a different Wi-Fi network or a mobile data connection to make sure the website is accessible. Common error messages include:
- “This site can’t be reached”
- “The page isn’t responding”
- “Check your internet connection. ERR_INTERNET_DISCONNECTED”
- “DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NO_INTERNET”
For network issues, start by turning off your Wi-Fi router for 10 seconds and then turning it back on. This will flush the network cache and should clear out any temporary issues with your connection. If the issue persists after that, or you are seeing an error 107, it’s possible that your home, company, or university network is blocking access to the site and you should check with your network administrator.
If you are based in a country that restricts internet access, consider these suggestions to bypass internet restrictions.
Occasionally, installing or updating a plugin or theme might take your site down, displaying a critical or fatal error such as:
- “There has been a critical error on this website”
- “WordPress has a built-in feature that detects when a plugin or theme causes a fatal error on your site…”
When this occurs, you will receive an email with additional information about the error. However, in some cases the error might prevent emails from being sent, so you can also visit your site’s logs to identify what caused the error. Visit our guide to identify the source of a critical error.
The Jetpack plugin powers all plugin-enabled sites hosted on WordPress.com. To function correctly, Jetpack must always be installed and active on your plugin-enabled site but it’s possible that Jetpack can become disconnected as a result of a plugin or a problem during a migration.
Problems with the Jetpack connection may make your site or admin dashboard inaccessible. In your account, it may appear as if your site is no longer part of your account or admin screens may be blank. In these cases, your site and content is not actually gone (it’s very difficult to completely lose everything!) but the broken Jetpack connection is preventing you from accessing the site until the connection is repaired. Learn how to resolve Jetpack errors here.
Plugin-enabled websites are backed up daily by your plan. To bring your website back online, you can restore it to a previous time when it was last working. If you cannot access backups, you’ll need to check your domain, plan, and your Jetpack connection first.
If you’ve checked all the above possibilities and still cannot get your site back online, contact your host’s customer support service. If your site is hosted with WordPress.com, contact our Happiness Engineers, who can help investigate the issue. If you’re unsure where your site is hosted, enter the address into the Site Profiler to find out about any site’s hosting provider and domain registration.
