How to Be Prepared for Website Outage
It never feels good when your website is down or is certainly going through certain performance problems. You could have invested lots of effort, money and time to maintain your site?s uptime. However, despite your very best efforts, a website or perhaps 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 important security update. The fact is that downtime will likely have adverse effects on your own business. It can damage your sales conversions, profitability and brand reputation.
How to React When Your Website is Down? By preparing for the worst situation you may be able to minimize the web site downtime. Preparation also helps to reduce the damage to your reputation and revenue stream. The way you will respond when your website is in crisis is truly a two front battle: technical and social. If you ignore the social part, your site may experience a more impressive problem. In addition to the technical and social aspects of downtime, there are two different types of outages. Each type may necessitate a different way of resolving the problem.
Types of Outages - Planned or Unplanned Downtime could be either be planned or unplanned. Planned downtime means you purposely make your site inaccessible for a short period of time. This is not something a business owner will would rather do, however in some cases it's important. When you have a planned temporary shutdown, make sure you inform both kind of visitors to your website i.e. humans and internet search engine bots. Also, you should mention the approximate duration of downtime.
In case of an unplanned outage, your site experiences a downtime situation because of certain circumstances caused by problems with hardware, network or software. At first, you may not even know what the reason for the web site downtime. Such unplanned outages cause much anxiety for you as an internet site owner or administrator. It needs knowledge, skill and ability to restore the website to normalcy.
When it's an unplanned outage, here are a few steps that you should follow:
Check Why YOUR SITE is Having Outage Often, downtime can be an issue away from control. It really is caused by a local internet connectivity failure, hardware failure or a software malfunction. As soon as you become aware of your site downtime, access your website and do a walk-thru the web site. The intention of this exercise is to discover the cause of the website 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. A good website monitoring service can be a great assist in quickly performing a comprehensive check of the functioning of the various components of the web site.
Notify Your Team About Downtime After the website experiences a downtime, there exists a need to communicate the information quickly to the responsible people for quick resolution. If your company is having a recognised method and list of contacts to reach during website failure you have prepared well. This helps you to reduce confusion, stress and steer clear of inefficient handling of the problem. No doubt, this really helps to quickly get your site back to available status for the site visitors.
Locate the Root Cause of Website Downtime There may be various reasons behind an internet site outage. To address the problem you need to discover the root cause. Determining the main problem will not only be difficult but additionally frustrating when done manually without the help of a website monitoring service.
Web monitoring services are very helpful during downtimes, as possible use their comprehensive assessment abilities to check your website performance and downtime status. Such reports will assist you to locate the root cause of website downtime.
Website monitoring apps can help specifically identify the kind of issue that's possibly causing the downtime. Many advanced website monitoring providers allow many different scripts to be set you back test and identify which components are malfunctioning. Using this information on specific malfunctioning areas, it is possible to intelligently guess the cause of the issue and trouble shoot it.
Communicate With Visitors and Search Engine Bots During your website downtime, visitors and internet search engine bots to your internet site will get a 404 error message. In that situation, many of the visitors in addition to the internet search engine bots will assume your website no longer exists. Such an impression in your brain of the visitors could be detrimental for the business.
You should communicate concerning the downtime issue through a customized error page that indicates your site is currently experiencing downtime and preferably indicate the timeframe after which your website can be 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 website downtime. This allows one to fix the downtime problem with less pressure.
Fix the Downtime Issue As soon as you become alert to the cause your website downtime, your aim is to quickly rectify the error. While you are fixing the problem you can re-direct users to a second website. Overall, you must ensure that users will need to have minimum service interruption.
Website Monitoring Service ? an Essential Tool to reduce Downtime It is better to use a site monitoring service for continuously monitoring your website uptime. Manual monitoring is neither extensive nor continuous. Further, the nice website monitoring providers provide many advanced and in-depth features that help in monitoring uptime for a wide variety of downtime or performance issues. While, website monitoring services cannot promise that your site will never decrease. But if such situation does arise, the web site monitoring app can not only assist you to resolve downtime issues with ease but also help to recover quickly from the website downtime situation.