Your business website is like an online storefront and it’s the first point of contact for most of your new and existing customers. That means that if your website goes down, even for a short period, you lose a lot of potential business. Website downtime also damages trust in your business and makes you look unprofessional, so you need to avoid it at all costs. Although there is no way to completely eliminate website downtime, there are some simple steps that you can take to limit it and, when it does happen, get things back up and running as quickly as possible. These are the best ways to limit business website downtime.
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The hosting services that you choose to use are so important. Many websites crash because they don’t have the hosting capacity to handle the number of visitors that they get. This is very common when a business is going through a period of growth and they don’t update their hosting services accordingly, so an increase in traffic causes the website to crash. It is important that you find reliable hosting services, and you should look for ones that provide a website management tool as well, like Intelligent DS, so you can easily update the website when needed. Unless you invest in reliable hosting services, your website will continually crash and you will lose a lot of potential customers.
Websites don’t just go down due to high traffic levels, they may also crash as a result of a cyberattack. If you are unable to deal with a cyber attack, your website may be down for an extended period and that will lead to a lot of lost revenue. It’s important that you invest in your security so you can prevent cyberattacks. However, you are never completely safe, so you need a disaster recovery plan in place, so you can secure your systems and get the website back online as quickly as possible.
Your business website could be crashing more than you realize, even if it just goes down for a minute or two. It is important that you know the scale of the problem, which is where an uptime monitoring plugin can be very useful. It will constantly monitor the website and alert you to any periods of downtime. This will let you know if you have an issue with downtime and also help you to determine what the cause of the downtime is, especially if it always happens at the same time of day.
Even if your site is up and running, you could be losing business if it is very slow. People don’t have much patience with a slow website, so they are not likely to wait around for it to load so they can make a purchase. You can easily check your site speed online, and you should do this on a regular basis. If it is very slow, you may have an issue with your hosting or the design of the site itself.
Reducing website downtime is absolutely vital if you want to avoid losing a lot of potential customers. These basic steps can help to reduce downtime and help to deal with it if it does happen.
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