---
title: "Website Down Message: Wording for Your Readers and Customers"
url: https://hostmy.blog/website-down-message-customers/
date: 2026-10-17
modified: 2026-10-17
lang: en
author: "Aditya Sharma"
description: "Four lines every site-down message needs, copy-ready wording for readers, customers and partners, and why a maintenance page should send a 503, not a 200."
categories:
  - "WordPress"
image: https://hostmy.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/hmb-card-2546-1024x538.jpg
word_count: 1543
---

# Website Down Message: Wording for Your Readers and Customers

A website down message has one job: to tell people four things before they have to guess. What is happening, who it affects, what you are doing, and when you will say more. Everything else in this post is wording and logistics around those four things.

Most owners write the message after the panic, on the wrong channel, and from the site that is down. This post gives you the website down message to customers you can have ready, the places to put it, and one technical detail, the status code on a maintenance page, that decides whether search engines read your downtime as a pause or as a problem.

## First, be sure it is down for everyone

Before you announce anything, check that the outage is real and not local. Load the site on your phone using mobile data, not your home wifi, and again in a private window. If you can, ask someone in another city. A page that loads for you from a cache can still be failing for new visitors, and a site that fails only for you can be a local network or browser problem.

Then work out what kind of down it is, because the wording differs. A completely unreachable site, a site showing an error page, and a site that loads but cannot take orders or send forms are three different messages. If you are not sure which one you have, say less rather than guess, and use [what a real WordPress uptime problem looks like from the logs](/wordpress-downtime/) to find out.

## What every message needs

Whatever the channel, a good message answers four questions, in this order.

| Line | What it says | Example |
| ---- | ------------ | ------- |
| What is happening | One plain sentence, with no cause you have not confirmed | Our website is currently unavailable. |
| Who is affected | Readers, customers, or only one part such as checkout | You cannot read posts right now, and new orders cannot be placed. |
| What you are doing | Shows that someone has it | We are working on it now. |
| When you will update | A time for the next message, not a fix time | We will post again by 4pm, fixed or not. |

Leave out the things that feel reassuring and cause trouble later: a guessed fix time, a cause you have not confirmed, blame for the host or a plugin, and technical terms your readers do not use. A fix time you miss is worse than none. An update time you keep is better than either.

## A bad message and a better one

Here is the kind of message that gets sent in a hurry.

`Sorry for the inconvenience! We are experiencing technical difficulties due to a server issue with our host and expect to be back within the hour.`

It apologises before it informs, names a cause nobody has confirmed, blames a third party, and promises an hour that may not hold. Here is the same message with the four lines.

`Our website is currently unavailable, so you cannot read posts or place orders. We are working on it now. We will post another update by 4pm, whether or not it is fixed.`

It is shorter, it says what the reader wants to know, and every promise in it is one you can keep.

## Wording you can copy

Keep these somewhere you can reach when the site is down, which means not on the site. Change the details and send.

A pinned post for the social account your readers follow:

`Our website is down at the moment. We are working on it and will post an update by [time]. If you need us, reply here or email [address].`

An email to subscribers or customers:

`Subject: Our site is down, and what it means for you

Hello [name],

Our website is currently unavailable. [One line on what this affects, for example: new orders cannot be placed. Only say that orders already placed are unaffected if you have checked.]

We are working on it now. We will email again by [time] with an update, whether or not it is fixed.

If you need anything urgently, reply to this email.

[Your name]`

An auto-reply for the support inbox:

`Thank you for writing. Our website is down, so replies may be slower than usual. We will answer as soon as we can, and we will post updates on [channel].`

A note to an ad network, sponsor or affiliate partner, for bloggers who earn from the blog:

`Our site is currently down, so any campaign pages will not load. We are working on it and will confirm as soon as it is back. We will tell you if the outage affects delivery or reporting for [campaign].`

The headline and text for a planned maintenance page:

`We are updating the site. Back by [time]. Thank you for your patience.`

## Where to say it

The channel matters as much as the wording. A message that lives on the site that is down reaches nobody. Put it somewhere that stays up when your site does: a pinned post on the social account your readers follow, an email to your list, and, for anything longer than an hour, a simple status page hosted away from your site. A free status-page service and a plain page on a separate host both work.

If readers email or message you, put the same four lines in your auto-reply, so the answer reaches them before the question does. Tell your team or contributors the same thing at the same time, so nobody contradicts the message in a reply.

## How quickly to say something

Aim to say something within about half an hour of confirming the outage, even if all you can say is the first and third lines: the site is down, and you are working on it. The diagnosis can wait, and the first message is not the place for it.

Pick update times you can keep, and keep them even when there is no news. A message that says the problem is not fixed yet and the next update is at 5pm tells readers more than silence does. For a short outage, one update an hour is plenty. For a long one, move to a status page and stop writing individual replies.

## The maintenance page: send a 503, not a 200

If the downtime is planned, such as an update or a migration, the page people see matters to search engines too. Google's long-standing advice for planned downtime is to return a 503 status, service unavailable, instead of a 404 or an error page that returns 200. A 503 tells crawlers the downtime is temporary, and an optional Retry-After header can say when to come back. Google describes this in its [guide to planned site downtime](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime).

Check what your maintenance page sends. This command shows the status line and any Retry-After header.

`curl -sI https://yourdomain.com/ | grep -iE '^(HTTP|retry-after)'`

You want to see `503 Service Unavailable` and ideally a `Retry-After` line. WordPress sends a 503 itself during its own automatic updates, which is why its brief maintenance message appears and then clears. Maintenance-mode plugins differ, and some return a 200 page that happens to say the site is down. That is the case to catch. If the result looks wrong, load the page in your browser and check the network tab, because some maintenance plugins answer a header-only request differently from a normal page load.

Do not leave a 503 in place. Google's documentation says that URLs which persistently return a server error are removed from the index, so a maintenance page that outlives the maintenance becomes a visibility problem. Google gives no exact cut-off, so treat anything beyond a day or so as an outage plan, not a pause, and put a real status message in front of readers, not just a banner.

## After it is back

Close the loop in the same places you opened it. Send one short message: it is fixed, what was affected, and what you are changing. People forgive downtime far more readily than silence, and the follow-up is where you earn that back.

Then check the things downtime breaks quietly: forms still deliver, checkout still works, scheduled posts still publish, and your ad scripts load. A site can return 200 and still be partly broken, which is the argument in [what breaks on a WordPress site when nobody is watching](/what-breaks-when-nobody-is-watching/). Decide what you will watch next time using [what to actually monitor on a WordPress site](/wordpress-monitoring/), so that you hear about it from an alert and not from a reader.

## Where Host My Blog fits

Everything above is free. A message template costs nothing and a pinned post costs nothing. The part that cannot be templated is finding out at two in the morning that the site is down, and knowing what broke.

On the blogs we look after, we watch the site around the clock, and a named person replies in hours, in plain English, when something breaks. If you would rather not be the person who gets that alert, that is what [our care for bloggers](/for-bloggers/) is for. If you would rather handle it yourself, copy the wording above and keep it somewhere that stays up.

If your site went down in the next ten minutes, where would your readers find out first: from you, or from a broken page?