How to Fix “This Site Can’t Be Reached” and DNS Errors on Windows

How to Fix “This Site Can’t Be Reached” and DNS Errors on Windows

You type an address into your browser, hit enter, and instead of the page you get “This site can’t be reached” — sometimes with a code underneath it like DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN or ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED. Other sites might load fine, or nothing loads at all, and restarting the browser doesn’t help.

Despite how it looks, this almost never means the website itself is broken. It’s a DNS error — your PC failed to translate the site’s name into an address before the connection was even attempted — and the actual cause is usually sitting somewhere between your PC, your router, and whichever DNS server your connection is configured to use.

Quick explanation: this guide walks through how to confirm it’s actually a local DNS problem, the specific fixes that resolve it on Windows, and how to tell when the issue is actually your router or your ISP instead.

For the full feature list and usage details, you can also visit the Fixyfier Documentation.

Quick Answer

“This site can’t be reached” alongside a DNS-flavored error code almost always means your PC couldn’t resolve the site’s address, not that the site is down — confirm that by loading the same page on your phone with Wi-Fi off. If it works there, start with flushing your DNS cache (ipconfig /flushdns), and if that doesn’t help, switch your network adapter to a public DNS server like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 instead of relying on your ISP’s default. If every device on your network has the same problem at once, the cause is your router or your ISP rather than anything on your PC.

What “This Site Can’t Be Reached” Actually Means

“This site can’t be reached,” along with codes like DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN or ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED in Chrome and Edge, is a DNS error, not a website error. Before your browser can load a page, Windows has to translate the address you typed — example.com, say — into the numeric IP address the site actually lives at. This message means that translation failed before the connection was even attempted.
That distinction rules out an entire category of things people try first. The website’s own server, its hosting, and its actual uptime have nothing to do with this error — the failure happens locally, on your PC, your router, or the DNS server your connection is configured to use, well before any request reaches the site.
The rest of this guide works through those three possibilities in order, starting with the one that’s both the most common and the easiest to rule out.

Confirming It’s Your PC, Not the Website

Before changing any settings, check whether the problem is actually local. Turn off Wi-Fi on your phone, switch to mobile data, and try loading the same page. If it opens without trouble, the site is fine and the problem is somewhere in your home network or your PC’s configuration — which is what the rest of this guide addresses.
It’s also worth checking whether the problem follows you to other sites or is isolated to just one. A single unreachable site with everything else working normally often means that specific site is genuinely down. Several unrelated sites failing the same way, on the same PC, points squarely at a local DNS problem.
Fixyfier’s Test Internet Connection tool runs this same kind of connectivity check directly from its Network & Connectivity section, so you don’t need a second device to confirm it.

Clearing and Resetting DNS on Windows

Windows keeps a local cache of DNS lookups so it doesn’t have to ask the DNS server for the same address twice. That cache is usually helpful, but if it stored a bad or outdated entry — often after a site changes servers, or after a brief DNS outage — it will keep serving the broken result even after the underlying problem clears up.
Clearing it forces Windows to look up every address fresh. Open Command Prompt or Terminal as administrator and run the command below; you should see a confirmation that the cache was successfully flushed.
ipconfig /flushdns
Fixyfier’s Quick Fix section includes Flush DNS Cache as a one-click action — the same command, without opening a command line.

Switching to a Public DNS Server

By default, your PC uses whatever DNS server your ISP assigns, usually automatically through your router. Most of the time that’s fine, but ISP DNS servers are occasionally slow, overloaded, or briefly unreliable — and when that happens, every device on your network that relies on them starts seeing the same DNS errors at once.
Switching to a public DNS service — Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 or Google’s 8.8.8.8 are the two most widely used — removes your ISP’s DNS server from the equation entirely. Go to Settings > Network & internet > your connection > DNS server assignment > Edit, switch it to Manual, turn on IPv4, and enter 1.1.1.1 as the preferred server and 1.0.0.1 as the alternate.
Fixyfier’s View IP Configuration tool shows exactly which DNS servers your connection is currently using before you make this change, so you know what you’re switching away from.
NordVPN
A Related Note

Your DNS Server Can See Every Site You Visit

Switching to a public DNS server fixes connectivity, but it's worth knowing that whichever DNS provider you use — your ISP's or a public one — can see every domain you look up. NordVPN routes that traffic through its own encrypted DNS instead, keeping your browsing private from both your ISP and any public resolver.

Keep My Lookups Private

Resetting the Network Stack

If flushing DNS and switching servers doesn’t help, the problem may be deeper in Windows’ own networking components rather than DNS specifically — the Winsock catalog or the TCP/IP stack itself can get into a state where lookups fail even when the DNS server is working fine. This is more invasive than the previous steps, so it’s worth trying only after the simpler fixes haven’t worked.
Open Command Prompt as administrator and run both commands below, then restart the PC — a restart is required for the reset to fully take effect.
netsh winsock reset
netsh int ip reset
Fixyfier’s Network & Connectivity section includes both Reset TCP/IP Stack and Reset Winsock Catalog as separate one-click actions, so you can run either one without memorizing the netsh syntax.

When It’s Actually Your Router or ISP

If every device on your network shows the same DNS errors at the same time — not just one PC — the problem almost certainly isn’t Windows at all. Restarting the router clears its own DNS cache and often resolves this on its own, the same way flushing DNS does for a single PC.
If restarting the router doesn’t help and every device is still affected, the most likely explanation is a problem with your ISP’s DNS servers rather than anything in your control. Switching the router itself to a public DNS server, rather than just your PC, fixes this for every device on the network at once — though that setting lives in the router’s admin page, not Windows.
Fixyfier’s Release & Renew IP Address action is worth trying at this stage too — it asks your router for a fresh network configuration, which occasionally clears up a DNS handoff that got stuck between your PC and the router.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is “This site can’t be reached” the same as the site being down?

No. It specifically means your PC couldn’t translate the site’s name into an address, which is a DNS failure on your end — the site itself may be running normally. Checking the same page on your phone with Wi-Fi off is the fastest way to tell the two apart.

Does switching to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 fix DNS errors permanently?

It removes your ISP’s DNS server as a possible cause, which resolves the problem in a lot of cases, but it isn’t a universal fix. If the underlying issue is Windows’ own network stack or your router, you may still need to reset TCP/IP and Winsock, or restart the router, even after switching DNS servers.

Why does this happen on only one device and not others on the same network?

If only one PC is affected, the DNS server itself usually isn’t the problem — everything else on the network would be failing too. It more often points to that PC’s local DNS cache, its network adapter settings, or a stuck Winsock configuration, which is why resetting DNS is a per-device fix rather than something you change once for the whole network.

Let Fixyfier Run These Network Fixes in One Place

Fixyfier’s Network & Connectivity section covers every fix in this guide as a one-click action: Flush DNS Cache, View IP Configuration, Release & Renew IP Address, and Reset TCP/IP Stack and Reset Winsock Catalog — so you can work through them in order without opening Command Prompt at all.
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