If Your Website Goes Down, Can Customers Still Reach You?

Most service businesses get work three ways: the website form, the phone and email. On a lot of the small business setups I look at, all three hang off one hosting account, one login or one person who set it up years ago.

When that one thing breaks, everything goes quiet at once. A plugin update takes the site down. The card on file for the domain expires and the email stops with it. Somebody's password gets stolen. And the worst part is that you don't hear about it, because the customers who would tell you are the ones who can't reach you.

None of the fixes below are expensive or technical. They are setup work you do once, on a slow afternoon, so that a bad day is an inconvenience instead of a lost week of calls. If your site is down right now, read our website is down page first, then come back to this.

1. Write down where everything lives

You can't fix what you can't log in to. Make one list with:

• Where your domain is registered, when it renews and which card pays for it
• Where your website is hosted and who has the login
• Where your email runs (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or the hosting account)
• Who provides your business phone line, and how to forward it
• Who has access to your Google Business Profile

Keep the logins in a password manager that at least two people can open. Turn on multifactor sign-in for the domain, hosting and email accounts. CISA puts it plainly: “Users who enable MFA are significantly less likely to get hacked.”

2. Don't keep every egg in one account

If your email runs on the same hosting account as your website, one suspended account takes out both. The same goes for a web person who registered your domain in their own name. Two changes cover most of the risk:

• Email on its own service. When the website is down, you can still answer customers and your vendor's emails still reach you.
• Domain in your name, on auto-renew, with a card that won't expire soon. An expired domain takes the website and email with it.

3. Make sure the phone keeps ringing

The phone is the line that matters most, and it usually has nothing to do with the website. Still, check these:

• You know how to forward the office line to a cell phone, and you have tried it once.
• Your voicemail greeting gives a second way to reach you, like a cell number or text line.
• The number on your website, your Google Business Profile and your truck all match.

4. Know when the website breaks, before a customer does

• Uptime alerts to your phone. Somebody should get a text within minutes when the site stops loading.
• A backup that lives somewhere else and that someone has actually restored once. A backup stored on the same server as the site goes down with it.
• A monthly form test. Send your own quote form from your phone. If the email doesn't arrive, you just found an outage that was costing you leads. (Here is how to count form sends and calls so you notice a drop.)
• A plain “we're open, call us” page your web person can put up in minutes if the full site will be down for a while.

5. Keep your Google Business Profile right

During a website outage, a lot of people will find you through your Google profile instead. Make sure its phone number and hours are current, because that is what they will call.

Don't mark the business closed because the website is down. Google's own rules use special hours for a short change (a closure of up to six days in a row) and “temporarily closed” for seven days or more. Use them when the business itself is closed, not the website.

6. Put the plan on one page

Ready.gov's business planning guidance treats communications, IT recovery and continuity plans as parts of the same plan. For a small shop that can be one sheet of paper:

• Who notices first, and who they call
• Who calls the web person, the host and the phone provider
• What you tell customers who call in, and what goes on Facebook or your Google profile
• Where the logins list lives

Then spend 15 minutes walking through it with whoever answers your phone.

If you work for a city, county or township

Since September 30, 2025, Ohio Revised Code 9.64 requires counties, townships and municipal corporations to report a cybersecurity incident to the state's Division of Homeland Security within seven days of discovering it, and to the Auditor of State within thirty. Its definition of an incident includes unauthorized access that comes through a compromised cloud service provider, managed service provider or third-party data hosting provider.

The law puts the reporting duty on the public body, not on its vendors. But if you host, manage or build anything for one, it is sensible to keep dated notes of any incident that touches their work, so you can answer their questions quickly.

The checklist

When to get help

Most of this list is yours to do: the logins, the phone forwarding, the one-page plan and the Google profile. Nobody knows your business better.

Get help with the website side when:

• You don't know who has the hosting or domain login, or the person who did has moved on.
• Nobody gets an alert when the site goes down.
• You have never seen a backup restored.
• Your form has stopped sending before and you only found out later.

That is what our website care covers: updates, backups, uptime watching and fixing broken forms, with a short written log of the work. We also take over sites we didn't build. We look them over first and tell you what needs fixing before we take them on.

Questions

Sources

• Ohio Revised Code 9.64: Cybersecurity program; incident reporting
• Google Business Profile Help: How to set special hours
• CISA: More than a password (multifactor authentication)
• Ready.gov: Ready Business

Drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above on October 30, 2026.