A broken website rarely announces what actually failed. Troubleshooting is finding the real cause before changing anything, because a fix aimed at the wrong problem is just a second problem.
Website troubleshooting is a one-off job: work out why a site is down, broken or misbehaving, fix the actual cause, and hand back a working site with a plain explanation of what happened. It is a different service from website maintenance, which is the ongoing care that stops most of these situations arising in the first place.
The order matters more than the tools. Diagnosis comes first, every time, because most website failures present the same few symptoms from completely different causes, and the expensive mistake in this business is fixing the wrong one.
The shape of the problem is usually one of a short list, even when the cause is not.
Fully down has a short cause list: hosting, domain expiry, DNS, or a certificate. Down for some people and fine for others is nearly always DNS or caching, and it is the version that convinces owners they are going mad, because the person they call sees a working site.
An update ran, a plugin changed, someone edited a page, the hosting migrated, and now the layout is wrong or a feature is dead. These are the most solvable failures on this page because the timeline points at the cause. The job is confirming it rather than assuming it, because sometimes the change and the breakage are a coincidence.
The quiet one, and the expensive one. A form that stopped delivering does not look broken. It looks like a slow month, and it can stay that way for weeks. The cause is usually mail authentication or a changed setting rather than the form itself, which is why fixing the form and testing the form are different things.
Browser warnings are usually a certificate problem, which is boring and fixable. Content you did not put there is a compromise, which is a different job with a different order of operations: contain first, clean second, then close the hole it came in through. What each warning means is written up on website security problems.
Slow, flaky, intermittently weird. These are the cases where diagnosis earns its keep, because guessing is how a business ends up paying for a new host, a new theme and a new developer when the problem was one misbehaving component all along.
See the failure ourselves, on your site, and tie it to a date or a change where possible. A failure that cannot be reproduced gets instrumented instead, so the next occurrence tells us what we need.
Domain, DNS, certificate, hosting response. A surprising share of "the website is broken" is one of these four, all of them checkable before anyone logs in to anything.
The discipline of the whole job. Changes made while guessing destroy the evidence of what was actually wrong, and stacked guesses are how a small problem becomes an unrecoverable one.
Then verify the fix the way a visitor would: load the page, submit the form, follow the link. A fix that was never tested from the outside is a hope.
What was wrong, what changed, and whether it can come back. If it can, we tell you what prevention looks like and you decide. The write-up is yours either way.
None of this requires expertise, and any of it shortens the paid work if you do call.
Troubleshooting is fix first, then decide what ongoing care should look like, if any. The senior team that does the diagnosis is the team that does the repair.
Yes, and most troubleshooting work is exactly that. The person who built the site is gone, or unreachable, or the relationship ended, and the site has been limping along since. We start from what is actually there rather than from documentation that probably does not exist.
What we need is access, or the ability to get access. If nobody can log in to the hosting, the domain or the content system, that access problem gets solved first, and it is solvable more often than people fear: see technical cleanup for how that recovery usually runs.
The site address, what is wrong in your own words, and roughly when it started. That last one matters more than people expect: "after we changed hosting" or "since last Tuesday" cuts the possibilities down enormously.
Then whatever access exists: hosting account, domain registrar, content system login. If you do not know where those are, say so. Finding them is a normal first step, not an embarrassment.
Then we say that, with reasons, before you spend money propping it up. Some sites are one fix away from fine. Some are held together in a way where every fix disturbs two other things, and the honest arithmetic favours a rebuild.
Diagnosis tells you which one you have. What we will not do is bill you monthly to keep something on life support without telling you that is what is happening. If it is the rebuild case, read website redesign before deciding anything.
We do not promise response times on a page and then caveat them in the small print. We are a small senior team with published hours on the contact page, and a site that is down or actively misbehaving goes to the front of the queue because that is obviously where it belongs.
What we can say is that the first useful answer usually comes early. "Here is what is wrong and here is what fixing it involves" does not take long for most of the failures on this page.
Both. You get told what was wrong, what was changed, and what it means for the future, in plain English. A fix you do not understand leaves you exactly as dependent as you were before it.
If the same failure is likely to come back without ongoing attention, we say so and point at what would prevent it. If it was a one-off, we say that too, and you keep the write-up either way.
Edits, updates, backups and monitoring so the site keeps working.
Diagnose what is actually wrong with your email, accounts or website before paying anyone to fix it.
Warnings, hacks and certificate errors, and what each one means.
Find the real cause instead of guessing at it.
Rebuild an existing site without losing the rankings you already have.
Untangle the accounts, domains and logins nobody has a full list of.
The site address, what is wrong in your own words, and when it started. You will get back what we think is happening and what it would take to fix, not a sales pitch.