How to Be Prepared for Website Outage
It never feels good whenever your website is down or is certainly going through certain performance problems. You might have invested many effort, money and time to maintain your website?s uptime. However, despite your very best efforts, a website or a server may occasionally experience outage or performance problems. Technical difficulties are inevitable that may cause the web site to be unavailable. Website can also be down for a few hours for an essential security update. The truth is that downtime will most likely have adverse effects on your business. It can damage your sales conversions, profitability and brand reputation.
How to React WHENEVER YOUR Website is Down? By finding your way through the worst situation you could be able to minimize the website downtime. Preparation also helps to reduce the damage to your reputation and revenue stream. The way you will respond whenever your website is in crisis is actually a two front battle: technical and social. If you ignore the social part, your website may experience a more impressive problem. In addition to the technical and social areas of downtime, there are two different types of outages. Each type may necessitate a different method of resolving the problem.
Types of Outages - Planned or Unplanned Downtime can be either be planned or unplanned. Planned downtime means you purposely make your site inaccessible for a brief period of time. This is simply not something a small business owner will would rather do, however in some cases it is necessary. When you have a planned temporary shutdown, make sure you inform both kind of visitors to your website i.e. humans in addition to search engine bots. Also, you should mention the approximate duration of downtime.
In the event of an unplanned outage, your site experiences a downtime situation because of certain circumstances due to issues with hardware, network or software. At first, you may not even understand what the cause of the website downtime. Such unplanned outages cause much anxiety to you as a website owner or administrator. It requires knowledge, skill and ability to restore the website to normalcy.
When it's an unplanned outage, here are some steps you need to follow:
Check Why Your Website is Having Outage Often, downtime is an issue beyond your control. It is usually the effect of a local internet connectivity failure, hardware failure or perhaps a software malfunction. Once you become aware of your site downtime, access your site and do a walk-thru the web site. The intention of this exercise is to uncover the cause of the web site downtime. Site monitoring services can help to detect the regions of the website which are having difficulty or identify of which step the loading of the website has stopped. An excellent website monitoring service can be quite a great help in quickly performing a comprehensive check of the functioning of the various components of the website.
Notify Your Team About Downtime After the website experiences a downtime, you will find a need to communicate the info quickly to the responsible people for quick resolution. If your organization is having a recognised method and list of contacts to reach at the time of website failure you have prepared well. This helps one to reduce confusion, stress and prevent inefficient handling of the situation. No doubt, this also helps to quickly get your website back to available status for the site visitors.
Locate the primary cause of Website Downtime There can be various reasons behind an internet site outage. To address the problem you need to discover the root cause. Figuring out the main problem will not only be difficult but also frustrating when done manually minus the help of a website monitoring service.
Web monitoring services have become helpful during downtimes, as possible use their comprehensive assessment abilities to check your site performance and downtime status. Such reports will assist you to locate the root cause of website downtime.
Website monitoring apps might help specifically identify the sort of issue that is possibly causing the downtime. Many advanced website monitoring providers allow a variety of scripts to be set you back test and identify which components are malfunctioning. By using this info on specific malfunctioning areas, you'll be able to intelligently guess the reason for the issue and trouble shoot it.
Communicate With Visitors and Search Engine Bots Throughout your website downtime, visitors and search engine bots to your internet site will receive a 404 error message. In such a situation, many of the visitors in addition to the internet search engine bots will assume your website no longer exists. This impression in the mind of the visitors could be detrimental for your business.
You should communicate concerning the downtime issue through a customized error page that indicates your website happens to be experiencing downtime and preferably indicate the timeframe and your website will become available. In addition, you can communicate the same during your website?s social media marketing accounts. For example, you should use Facebook and Twitter to keep your visitors informed about your site downtime. This allows you to fix the downtime problem with less pressure.
Fix the Downtime Issue As soon as you become aware of the cause your website downtime, your aim is to quickly rectify the error. When you are fixing the problem you could re-direct users to a second website. Overall, you must ensure that users must have minimum service interruption.
Website Monitoring Service ? an Essential Tool to reduce Downtime It is better to employ a site monitoring service for continuously monitoring your website uptime. Manual monitoring is neither extensive nor continuous. Further, the good website monitoring providers provide many advanced and in-depth features that assist in monitoring uptime for a wide selection of downtime or performance issues. While, website monitoring services cannot promise your site will never decrease. But if such situation does arise, the website monitoring app can not only enable you to resolve downtime problems with ease but also help to recover quickly from the site downtime situation.