Website troubleshooting tools

 

Overview

There are many free tools you can use to troubleshoot your website or any connection issues you may be seeing.

This article lists a variety of services you can use to troubleshoot your site before contacting support. If you still need to contact support, make sure to include the results of any tests you have run.

General

  • archive.org – View how a website appeared on a specific date in the past
  • online-domain-tools.com – A collection of online tools to help test and troubleshoot your site
  • mxtoolbox.com – A collection of tools (many email related) to troubleshoot your services

Domain registration

DNS tools

General DNS record lookups

CNAME

SRV

TXT

Email tools

MX

SPAM

IP address lookup

Network tools

Ping

The following links all offer IPv4 ping tests:

Traceroute

The following sites all offer IPv4 traceroute tests:

IPv6

Ping IPv6

The following links all offer IPv6 ping tests:

Traceroute IPv6

The following links all offer IPv6 traceroute tests:

Proxy sites

A proxy site can be used to view your website from a different location. For example, you can use a proxy site in France to check how and if your site is resolving in that location. Below are a few common proxy sites:

SSL tools

Website loading tools

Site load tests

The following sites test how long your page takes to load. They also gives details about what may be responsible for the load time:

DNS propagation tests

Location based tests

  • Speedtest.net – Tests your local network upload/download speed. Used to test if your specific location is where the network issue may be occurring.

Miscellaneous tests

Text editors

Text editors are used for managing your website, allowing you to edit your website's configuration files and pages. Below are a few common text editors:

Command-line tools

There are also several command-line tools that you can use to retrieve information about a domain or network condition(s). View the SSH article for details on how to log into your server.

The following is a list of basic examples. Make sure to read the links in each section for further details.

host

  • host – Converts names to IP addresses and vice versa.

Run host on example.com to find its IP and MX records:

[server]$ host example.com
  example.com has address 173.236.241.100
  example.com mail is handled by 0 mx1.mailchannels.net.
  example.com mail is handled by 0 mx2.mailchannels.net.
  

Run host on the IP to find its domain name:

[server]$ host 173.236.241.100
  100.241.236.173.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer example.com.
  

nslookup

WHOIS

Find details about a domain registration:

[server]$ whois example.com

dig

Look up the IPv4 of a domain:

[server]$ dig +short example.com

Look up the IPv6 of a domain:

[server]$ dig +short AAAA example.com

dig TXT record:

[server]$ dig TXT example.com

dig CNAME record. Make sure to enter the correct CNAME record before the domain:

[server]$ dig CNAME abcdefg.example.com

dig SRV record. Make sure to enter the correct SRV record before the domain:

[server]$ dig SRV _sip.example.com

ping

  • ping & ping6
  • Collecting Ping Results – ping a host to see if there is any packet loss

traceroute

  • traceroute & traceroute6
  • Traceroute – Tracks the route packets take from one location to another. Run traceroute to view all hops between your location and your website.

mtr

mtr combines the functionality of the traceroute and ping programs in a single network diagnostic tool:

[server]$ mtr dreamhost.com

openssl

Command line tool for using various functions of OpenSSL's crypto library:

[server]$ openssl s_client -connect example.com:443  

See also

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