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What To Do When Your Shopify Site Goes Down

Shopify downtime can be a real risk to your business. It can cause you unprecedented losses. For example, it can prevent clients from accessing your ecommerce store.


Anytime you experience situations like slow browsing or outage, it’s crucial to act swiftly to troubleshoot the issues and fix them.


How should you go about it?


In this article, we will:

  • Review what to do when your Shopify site goes down
  • Analyze how to tell if your Shopify site is down
  • Discuss common reasons your Shopify site is down

5 Things to Do When Your Shopify Site Goes Down

Here are five things you can do when your Shopify site is not working:

1. Contact the Shopify Customer Service

Contacting Shopify Customer Service can help. The Shopify support team understands most, if not all, of the technical issues you could be having. They can get you back online quickly.

How to Reach Out to the Support Team

When your Shopify website is down, contacting the Shopify support team to help you fix the situation can be helpful. Here are four ways to contact them.

Email

You can contact the Shopify support team members through email. Ensure you authenticate your store when emailing before indicating your issues to save time.

Phone

You can reach out to the Shopify support team via phone. Different regions have contact lines. Use the following contact info for the following regions, and remember to authenticate your store to save time.

  • North America: 1-855-816-3857
  • Hong Kong: +852800931270
  • Singapore: +658008526699
  • New Zealand: 07-788-6026
  • Ireland: +353 1800 851 000
  • Australia: 03-8400-4750
  • United Kingdom: 0800-808-5233

Twitter

You can contact the support team via Twitter, and they will get back to you. Using social media is quick and convenient.

Chat

Shopify customer service has chat systems where you can contact the support team. It is quick and easy to authenticate your store hence will reduce downtime.

2. Use Test Mode

If your customers are experiencing issues in payment, you can run a test. Place a dummy offer through the test mode in Shopify Payments. You can pass it on to Shopify customer support if you diagnose the problem.

3. Retrace Your Steps

Try finding the root cause. Check whether the problem could be due to an action you took. If you realize that it’s a new software installation or upgrade, you may try reloading or uninstalling. These two actions will help determine the next course of action.

4. Consult the Shopify Status Page

Sometimes, Shopify may be down due to site maintenance. It will help if you check whether the Shopify servers are running. Visit their URL https://www.shopifystatus.com/.

5. Use a Down Detector

Check the status of the Shopify page on Twitter or Google whether it may be down. Usually, if other businesses or customers are experiencing issues with the Shopify page, they will likely query on social media. You will know if other clients could be having the same issues.

If Shopify is down due to maintenance, inform your clients and keep monitoring the situation.

How Can I Tell My Shopify Store Is Down?

If you suspect that your Shopify website, look out for these signs: There are some common examples that you might go through when your store is unavailable.

  • Unresponsive pages
  • Customers are unable to complete checkouts or add items to their carts
  • When store pages are unclickable
  • When pages show up blank or odd layouts after clicking
  • When you get unexpected results after clicking certain features

Common Reasons Why Your Shopify Store Is Down When your Shopify seems to be down, it could be it’s because of the following commonly reported issues:

Shopify Website Is Down

Your Shopify Webpage could be unavailable or down because Shopify is doing maintenance or a more complex matter with their site. Typically, Shopify will notify you in advance of the planned interruption when the site is under maintenance. Suppose you suspect the problem could be something else rather than maintenance.


In this case, it will help to check the site's status using services like ‘DownDetector’ or ‘IsItDownRightNow.’ You could also check if other businesses are having similar issues via communities or Shopify reviews.

Problematic Apps or Themes

This could be the issue if you are using some third-party applications on the Shopify app store. Third-party apps on the Shopify app store are fantastic, but some might be incompatible with some apps or other themes. Incompatibility may lead to your site’s failure or malfunctioning.


Also, the more apps you install, the more it will take to load the site.


To fix this issue, restore a backup, then perform the necessary updates to enjoy all Shopify’s advanced features. Consider uninstalling unnecessary apps too.

Unnecessary Graphics

Overuse or unnecessary videos and images may cause your browser to take longer to render. Loading heavy or large volumes of visuals may slow downloading of pages. Ensure you check files’ sizes before uploading them.

Unverified Domain

If your e-commerce store is new and not working as you would expect, it is possible that your email address for your store doesn’t match the one associated with your domain. You will need to verify that you own the domain before Shopify can release it from review. Ensure the details you use to set up the store are correct, then make any necessary changes on your website c-panel.


Similarly, if you want to add a new Shopify store, Shopify will place your account under review. So, you will need to prove the ownership of the domain so that they can release it from review.

Failed CSV Uploads

Errors arising from bulk uploads from a CSV file can cause Shopify downtime. Code mistakes or errors like column-naming discrepancies and corrupted files may occur when uploading a CSV file. So before you post any CSV files, it would help if you could run a backup.

Missing or Lost Files

When updating your store, adding new products, pages, or collections, you might accidentally or unknowingly delete a necessary code or file. It could be that your webpage won’t function without the code or file.


So restart the process all over. Shopify has a fully hosted backup solution running in the background. It enables you to create a copy of your store.

How Hyperping Can Help When Your Shopify Site Goes Down

There are several things that might lead to a Shopify downtime. However, there are many ways to avoid and fix downtime situations. To avert damages that come with downtime, monitor your Shopify sites using Hyperping. You will receive instant alerts as soon as it detects an anomaly, and you'll be able to react immediately.

Article by
Léo Baecker
I'm Léo Baecker, the heart and soul behind Hyperping, steering our ship through the dynamic seas of the monitoring industry.
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