What happens if my website goes down, and do I need backups?

While your site is down, you're invisible to anyone searching for your services — including the person with a burst pipe searching "plumber near me" right now. For a trades business, downtime during business hours is a direct hit to leads, not just an inconvenience.

The usual causes:

• A hosting outage — more common with cheap, oversold shared hosting
• An expired domain — surprisingly common when auto-renew isn't set up or a card on file expires
• A DNS misconfiguration, often after a change made by whoever manages your site
• A bad plugin or theme update on DIY builder platforms

What you want in place:

• Reliable, modern hosting — not the cheapest plan you can find
• Automated daily backups, so a bad update or an accidental deletion is a five-minute fix, not a lost site
• Uptime monitoring that emails or texts you the moment your site goes down
• Domain auto-renew turned on, with a card that won't expire unnoticed

Recovery should mean restoring from a backup in minutes, not rebuilding from scratch over days. If whoever manages your site can't tell you how backups and recovery work, that's worth asking about now — before you need it.