We can’t control everything in our lives and that’s a fact. But, as business owners, we’d all like to be able to control when our company is available for customers.
Websites can go down for many different reasons, including planned maintenance or malicious attacks. It can be unavoidable at times– but no matter what, downtime can cost your business money until everything is back online.
So, what can you do? Develop a website downtime strategy to have on the backburner.
SiteUpTime is dedicated to helping businesses understand what goes on when their website goes down and how much time the business is actually functional online.
And with many businesses averaging $1,000 lost per minute of website downtime, having your website go offline throughout the month can really add up.
If you want to learn how to create a website downtime strategy that works to keep your business safe from downtime losses, be sure to keep reading!
Why downtime should be monitored
Downtime strategies are only important if you understand why downtime can be so hazardous to your business!
Here’s a quick breakdown of why this problem should be taken seriously.
Loss of business
This one is pretty clear: if your website isn’t working, customers can’t access it.
Studies have found that people are quick to leave a website if it doesn’t load fast enough. If your site isn’t working at all, potential customers are unlikely to come back and see if it’s working again at a later point.
Remember that time is money and even Amazon feels the blows of downtime– they lost 1.6 billion dollars in sales by being down for one second!
Make sure your service is working for you
If you are working with a company that is hosting your site, you will want to monitor your downtime to make sure that they’re actually working for you.
Meeting your ROI baseline is important and spending money on a network that is leaving you with nine hours of downtime a month doesn’t help.
You will want to know what’s going on so that you can make informed decisions on what direction to take your business and its online presence.
How to come up with a website downtime strategy that works
In the case that something does happen, you’ll want to be prepared and have a good downtime strategy to make the most of the time you have.
SiteUpTime can help you monitor your site to know when you’ll have to spring into action, so consider our competitive prices and contact us if you need more information!
Have valid data backups
When your website is offline, there’s no telling what caused it to go down.
It can be as simple as your service company being down for maintenance or as catastrophic as a complete wipe out of the entire network and data.
That’s why you’ll want to have up-to-date backups of all of your information. This means saving documents and client information and transaction information.
It’s recommended that companies back up their data at least once a week. The goal? You should be backing up your information once a day to prevent data loss or having to deal with piecing together information that’s a week outdated.
Once you do that, you’ll want to make sure your backups are working properly so that they can be accessed later.
It turns out that 48% of companies who have backed up their data experienced a secondary loss because the backup didn’t function properly.
Contact your IT support
If your website is down, make sure that contacting your IT support team is high on your downtime strategy list.
You will want to contact them to alert them that your website is down, if they don’t already know, and put together a plan of how to get it back online.
IT support teams can locate the reason for a website going down and find ways to re-route your network to bring everything back up.
But this won’t be a process that can happen in a few minutes. You’ll want to check in with them regularly until everything is back to normal, but don’t flood them or panic in the meantime.
Review your web monitoring logs
As a part of your downtime strategy, you should be reviewing your web monitoring logs to see if your site being down is part of a larger trend.
Your web monitoring logs could also let you know if your website is more likely to go down from one server than another, depending on the level of detail you get.
Gathering information such as when your website went down can be useful for your IT support team as well. Knowing how long a site has been down can give them an idea of how large the problem is or could be.
So make sure you get to look through this information as soon as possible!
Notify your users
Here’s a major step that’s often overlooked in downtime strategies.
You have to notify your users that your website is down.
Some people may think not acknowledging the site is down is the best plan of action, since maybe some customers won’t notice.
But facing the issue head-on is one way to ensure that customers who did notice are aware of what’s going on.
You may want to send out a tweet or mass-email to your clients letting them know that the problem is being worked on. From there, you can send out updates and a notification once your site is back up.
The benefit? You’ll have customers feeling valued that they’re kept in the loop. And you could avoid a flood of customer service calls full of people demanding to now why they can’t access their account!
Want more information?
If you want to learn more about how having a website downtime strategy can help you, don’t hesitate to reach out to us or check out our other blog posts.
SiteUpTime provides services that check your website from multiple points in the world to make sure people from anywhere can work with your company.
