Have you ever visited a company website and found that the site wasn’t accessible? This is largely in part to downtime. While there are a number of reasons a website could experience downtime, it can cost your business big. Whether the server is overloaded, the hardware malfunctions, or the data center experiences issues, the matter should be properly addressed so that you don’t experience negative impact on your business.
Things to Do to Minimize Downtime
Though there are plenty of uncontrollable factors that could be playing a role in your site’s downtime, it is extremely important that you take the necessary measures to minimize it happening – or at the very least, minimize the impact should your site go down. Below are a few things you can do before the site crashes:
- Invest in DNS backup services. Many times, the downtime your site experiences is directly related to your DNS. Having DNS backup services gives you a consistent look at your DNS data and also serves as a backup should your main DNS go down.
- Consider a monitoring service. The longer your site is down, the more money you’re allowing to go down the drain. To rectify the matter in a timely fashion, consider investing in website monitoring services. Such services will ping your site every so often and provide you with instant notifications the moment it goes down.
- Backup your databases. You should work with service providers such as Secure Data Recovery to safeguard your databases. By backing up your website database, you can easily retrieve the information without incurring huge costs should the site go down because it was hacked or some other unforeseen event.
- Keep your domain name registration up to date. You can avoid a lot of downtime headaches by simply being proactive. One simple step some business owners overlook is renewing your domain name. When your domain name expires, your site goes down and the risk of another company purchasing your domain name is imminent.
Consequences of Not Being Proactive
It may seem like you have to invest in a lot of different technological services and systems to minimize downtime and the impact should one occur. Be that as it may, when you consider the consequences of not being proactive with your website, you’ll likely be singing another tune. Below are a few ideas of what the impact of a website going down could have on your business:
- Lowered Search Engine Rankings – If you’re going to generate leads, you need to be among the top few pages of a search engine. After all, this is how your customers find you. If your site is consistently inaccessible to internet users, search engines like Google will lower your page rank, sending users to another source.
- Poor User Experience – No matter how wonderful your site looks and how great the deals you might be offering are, if your customer is unable to access your site or have a hard time once they’ve located your web address, this is often referred to as poor user experience. Users are not going to keep checking back to see when your site is live again, nor are they going to spend time trying to troubleshoot or wait for slow loads. Essentially, they move on to competitor sites and also share the news of your down site to others.
- Poor Reputation – Naturally, when consumers can’t access your site, they’re going to spread the word to others. This leads to poor reputation and can seriously turn off potential new consumers from doing business with you.
- Lost Profits – Lastly, a website that experiences a lot of downtime is going to end up losing profits. Your site acts as your business card, a platform for communicating with your target audience. When you’re unable to do this as a result of downtime, this leads to missed opportunities to create business. When customers are unable to access the site or have a rough experience while shopping (such as the site going down in the middle of a transaction), it leaves a bad taste in their mouth and prevent them from doing business with you in the future.
Now you may not have the funds and resources to ensure your site never goes down like Google does, but that doesn’t mean you should sit idly by until the worst occurs. Take the necessary steps now to protect your brand. By implementing the above mentioned steps, you can minimize the potential of your site going down along with the impact it could have on your business. As you can see from the consequences listed above, it’s probably best to invest in preventative measures now than it is to “hope” it doesn’t happen to you.