You put all this work into building a beautiful, responsive website for your business, and you’re getting tons of traffic from it. Your business is gaining new customers with its online presence and your sales and customer satisfaction rate have been improving.
Even if your server uptime is at 99%, this means that for over seven hours per month your customers cannot reach you or make purchases. Downtime, even as little as seven hours per month, can lead to detrimental results for your business.
What Does Poor Server Uptime Look Like?
Several factors can cause a server to go down, including server hardware issues, software issues, coding errors, network downtime and power outages to name a few. The possibilities are endless. When your site isn’t up and running like it should be, visitors might see the following:
- Http errors on the screen
- Hijacked pages that contain malicious content
- Dead pages where nothing loads at all
- Slow load times or “soft downtime,” in which the site is not actually down but its performance is affected to the point of being unable to operate
Any of these factors can quickly deter a customer. When they can quickly get to another site with just a click of a button, visitors are not likely to stick around and wait for your site to load. If your site experiences downtime frequently, customers will remember that, and make a poor association with your business.
Here are four reasons why you should take your website seriously and monitor your server uptime:
1. Prevent the loss of sales.
Server downtime is the equivalent of closing up shop. When the store is closed, there is no chance to make a sale. And when you can’t predict when your site will go down, you run the risk of closing your store during its prime shopping hours.
When the store is closed, there is no chance to make a sale. And when you can’t predict when your site will go down, you run the risk of closing your store during its prime shopping hours.
When your website is down, the possibility of a sale goes down with it. Customers can’t make purchases unless your site is up and running. The more frequently your website experiences downtime, the harder the loss of sales will affect your business.
Think of huge businesses that generate the majority of their revenue from online sales. A few hours of downtime can make a significant dent in their sales goal. For example, Amazon.com crashed for roughly two hours in June 2007. It cost them about $3.48 million in revenue.
While downtime may affect financial costs in immediate time, it can also affect future profits if your company’s brand and customer satisfaction are compromised. We’re getting into that below:
2. Protect your business’s reputation and image.
Your website is vital to your business’s brand and image. A customer’s interaction with your website can leave a lasting impression on their perception of your business.
If a customer visits your site when it is experiencing downtime, they might not come back. Even worse, if your site is running too slowly, the customer might give up and turn to your competitor’s site. This should be enough motivation to monitor your server uptime.
This should be enough motivation to monitor your server uptime.
Frequent downtime can also play a part in how easily customers can find your site. Google is not a fan of server issues. If your website is constantly down or running slowly for a few days, Google takes this into account and as a result, your search ranking can go way down.
Without a good search ranking, customers will have a hard time finding your site. Without customers, you will have no sales. Server downtime leads to a spiral of downfalls for your business.
3. Detect hackers immediately.
Hackers can affect your server uptime, as well as your brand reputation, customers and sales, just by entering malicious code into your site. When that happens, your site is sure to suffer a setback.
The benefit of a website monitoring service is that they will let you know right away when your website has been hacked and you can go in and address the issue. Without this monitoring service, you may go several hours or longer without knowing your website has been hacked. You risk the embarrassment of someone else, may even a customer, telling you what they saw on your site.
4. Understand your site’s performance.
In addition to notifying you of downtime or hacker issues, a website monitoring service can keep you informed of how well your website operates on a day-to-day basis. Many services can inform you of the following:
- How responsive your site is
- Whether your site contains to many graphics or animated items
- If you are in the top-10 search results in Google
- If your website is available around the clock
Monitoring services not only detect server and network issues as soon as they occur, but they also may provide insight on performance benchmarking, alerting capabilities, detailed reporting, data visualizations and more to keep your website and network running smoothly.
We’re Here For You
Server uptime monitoring is an efficient way to keep your online services working. Website uptime monitoring tests the performance of your website and checks whether your site is working well enough or not. This service helps in finding the weak points of a site and eliminating downtime.
Poor server uptime can have a number of effects on the success of your business. From financial losses to customer dissatisfaction and a compromised brand image, the downfalls are too significant to risk. Use a website monitoring service so that you are made aware of issues as they occur.
At SiteUptime, we notify you instantly by email or text message when your site goes down so that you can fix the problem before it affects your business’s revenue, customers or reputation. Our service also provides detailed statistics about your website’s availability and response times so that you can track how often your site is down.
For your online business to be successful, you need to eliminate downtime as much as possible. Uptime monitoring services are the best way to keep your website running well so you can continue to generate revenue and satisfy your customers.
