A Discussion On Why Website Uptime Is Extremely Important

In simple words, website uptime is the amount of time that your website is up or available for users to browse and use. The availability of your website is mainly up to the host that you use and most hosts typically aim to have 99% – 99.9% uptime. The vast majority of hosts don’t have 100% uptime, and since you probably can’t monitor your site 24/7, you need to choose a trustworthy host that will ensure your site is up 99.99% of the time. In this article, we will get into the details of exactly why uptime is so important as well as what you can do to safeguard your site so that it is almost always available.

You Can Lose Business

The first reason why website uptime is so important if you have an online business is because if visitors go to your site’s URL and it’s not available, then they will simply press the back button and find another business or site that is available. This will lead to a loss of business and profits, which is definitely not desirable. If you offer a range of products on your site or are running a service-based site or even an eCommerce site, then this will definitely negatively affect your customers and lead to a loss of revenue.

Bad For Your Brand

In addition to losing customers and sales, low website uptime will lead to your brand developing a negative image. After all, if people are trying to find your site and they can’t, then this will lead to a great deal of frustration. In turn, this will be very bad for your brand, which you definitely need to avoid by using the path.network.

Bad For SEO

Next, a website’s uptime is a ranking factor for SEO and if you depend on a lot of organic traffic, then this will definitely be bad for your website. After all, a low uptime will signal to Google that your site is unreliable, and it will lower its rankings. Lower ranking means that your site will not get as much organic traffic which means fewer customers, sales and incoming revenue. Also, it may even lead to Google applying a penalty to your site and even de-indexing it!

Bad For Paid Traffic

If you get the majority of your traffic through paid advertisements where you buy ads and the ad leads to your website or a specific page on your site, then if your site is not available, you will be wasting money. If people click on your ad and it goes to an unavailable site, you will still have to pay your traffic source. As you can see, this makes website uptime a crucial factor for both organic and paid traffic strategies. Even in the event that you have traffic coming in from social media pages such as Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest etc, an unavailable website will lead to the same issues.

The Need For Website Monitoring

As you can see, we have just looked at a few reasons why website uptime is so important and why it needs to be avoided. However, it is very difficult to know how much your website is available, unless you spend all day on your site. As a result, you need to use a website monitoring service or tool in order to check the availability of your site, all the time.

Now, if you do a quick Google search, you will find a host of free tools that you can use. Some of the best monitoring tools will actually allow you to test your website’s uptime from different countries around the world and will allow you to ping your site, every few minutes. One popular tool that you can check out is Uptime Robot. Some other popular tools include NewRelic, Load Impact etc. There are many different tools available and you should take some time to review all of the features, costs as well as reviews of each tool before you choose one. Know more.

Avoiding Website Downtime

Even though 100% uptime may be impossible to achieve, you can bring your site as close to it as possible. We will now look at a few tips that will help you to avoid website downtime.

Improve Security For Your Site

Unfortunately, your site can get hacked and this can lead to your website being down or unavailable. As a result, you should protect your website from common cyber-attacks such as DDoS attacks by using services like CloudFlare. There should also be standard security measures and practices in place and if you have staff running your site, then you should educate them on various best practices for safety.

Implement Automatic Server Failover Solutions

In the event that your website experiences a server failure, you should have an automatic server failover solution in place to almost immediately restore your website. The automatic detection system will immediately detect the server failure and then channel your traffic to a backup server, so you don’t experience any actual website downtime.

Make Sure There Is Enough Disk Space On Your Servers

When disk space runs out on your servers, this results in freezes, website crashes and a host of other problems. As a result, you should actively monitor your servers to ensure there is enough space and resources for your website to continue running smoothly.

Move To The Cloud

By moving to the cloud, you will no longer have to worry about failures due to physical hardware issues, power supply issues, managing your own servers etc. However, if you do move your website to the cloud, you should have multiple layers of security in place.

Closing Thoughts

The importance of having your website up almost 100% of the time is absolutely crucial to your business’s success and revenue. So, be sure to keep the above tips and suggestions in mind to put a layered monitoring and security system in place to ensure that your website is well protected. Once you form a proper strategy, then website uptime issues will be one less problem you’ll have to worry about.