You are bound to be a little frustrated when your website goes down, as you have spent time and money investing in the service, design, content and user experience. We explain how internet downtime can be more than just frustrating and could actually have a serious effect on your business.
Profits
If you run an ecommerce website, the one thing that will take the biggest hit during a website outage is your profits. Customers will no longer be able to use your website to take advantage of your product or services, or people could even be interrupted once they reach the checkout area, meaning you have lost a potential customer in the middle of a transaction.
Amazon is a perfect example of how a downtime can affect an ecommerce website. In 2007, Amazon’s annual net worth was a reported $14.8 billion, but an outage of approximately 2 hours resulted in the website missing out on $3.48 million. Whether you are a small company or a large international business, you can trust a downtime will play havoc with your turnover.
Customer Satisfaction
It won’t just be you that is frustrated with the downtime, your customers will be too – especially if they were interrupted during their checkout experience. The outage could result in a customer never returning to your website again, as they believe your unreliable website reflects your unreliable service. You must therefore aim to build their trust back, apologising to your audience on social media pages, such as Facebook and Twitter. The public apology will prove to your audience that this is an uncommon problem that you are attempting to resolve.
Investment Opportunities
No investor would consider working alongside an unreliable company that disappoints their customers. A business is all about the brand and your website is the voice of that brand – if your website can’t speak for itself, there’s no way an investor would consider working with you. So, if your website is experiencing much downtime, it might be time to change to a reliable web hosting provider, such as Certa Hosting.
Search Engine Rankings
If you are not ranking in Google, the chances are you are not ranking alongside your competitors in SERPs. You may therefore be a little unhappy to learn that downtime is one of the top five negative ranking factors, especially if a site regularly experiences outage for more than 24 hours at a time. Google can also deindex your website altogether if it is down for a week or more. The search engines want to provide their users with the most reliable websites possible – and an undependable website won’t make the grade.
If your website suffers downtime, don’t hesitate to contact your hosting company, ensure you backup your database and use the appropriate server downtime error codes. You should also double check your domain name registration is up-to-date, as it might simply need to be renewed to get it back up and running for your clients and customers. Google Webmaster Tools can also provide a detailed report on your website’s visibility, and can notify you should there be any errors identified when crawling your website.
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