When it comes to running an online business, one thing is non-negotiable:
Your website being accessible 24/7.
But while this isn’t a groundbreaking discovery, many site owners keep neglecting the importance of achieving 100% uptime and decide to run with the “fingers crossed, I never experience downtime” strategy.
The truth is:
Website downtime is preventable. You just need to be prepared.
In this article, we’ll cover everything from why keeping your site up should be your top priority to what causes downtime and how to prevent it.
Read on.
Why Is It Important To Prevent Website Downtime?
Experiencing downtime can negatively impact your bottom line, reputation, search rankings, and market share.
Here’s how:
Bottom Line
A study by Pingdom found that the average cost of downtime across all industries has grown to about $9000 per minute.
Of course, these losses aren’t evenly distributed. A significant factor is the size of the business where:
- Small businesses’ cost of downtime falls into a range of $137 to $427 per minute
- Larger businesses’ cost of downtime can reach $16,000 per minute
However, this comparison isn’t meant to belittle the losses of small businesses but rather showcase that no company is safe from losing money due to downtime.
SEO
Depending on how long the outage continues, you can experience a massive loss in organic traffic, ranking drops, or even the removal of the site from the Google Index.
However, all these negative results can happen only if your website has been unavailable for more than a day. That’s why it is important to get it up and running as fast as possible so the next time Google’s crawler visits your pages, it can see that it’s back online.
And as John Mueller said:
“If the URL returns HTTP 5xx or the site is unreachable, we'll retry over the next day or so. Nothing will happen (no drop in indexing or ranking) until a few days have passed. This includes HTTP 503 (which the hoster should use for downtime, but sometimes they don't), and also HTTP 429 (which is more like "slow down" and not "it's broken"). During this time, we slow down the crawling since it might be that we caused the issue.”
Reputation and Market Share
While reputation is a perceived metric and market share is an exact percentage, it’s needless to say that losing the former will inevitably lead to a drop in the latter.
And you can bet that users will immediately lose trust in your business if your website’s down.
Today’s users value experience more than your product and service. Yes, you read that right.
According to a Deloitte study:
- 83% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services
- 61% of customers would stop buying from a company because a competitor provided a better experience
Simply put, a short downtime might not seem like a big issue, but in reality, it could lead to a series of negative consequences.
But before you prevent it, let’s see what might cause your site to become unavailable.
What Causes Website Downtime?
From not enough server resources and software issues to human errors and targeted cyberattacks, these are some of the most common causes for downtime:
- Server Issues
Servers are the backbone of a website, and any hardware failures, network disruptions, or power outages can lead to downtime. These issues can stem from physical equipment failure or problems with the hosting provider’s infrastructure. If a server isn’t configured for redundancy or load balancing, a single failure can bring down the entire website.
- Software Update Errors: You probably rely on a variety of software, including content management systems (CMS), plugins, and custom applications. Updates to these tools are necessary for security and performance but can also introduce bugs or compatibility issues. If an update conflicts with other software or the underlying infrastructure, it can lead to crashes or other errors, causing the site to go down until the problem is fixed.
- Human Errors: Although hosting providers offer 99.9% uptime, you can exclude human errors altogether. Mistakes by developers, administrators, or even users can accidentally cause downtime. Errors such as misconfigured settings, unintended code changes, or accidentally deleting critical files are common causes. Since even small mistakes can have significant impacts, many organizations implement processes like version control and testing environments to minimize downtime risk due to human error.
- Traffic Spikes: Large surges in web traffic can overload a website’s resources, especially if the infrastructure isn’t designed to scale (i.e. shared hosting). Events like Black Friday, promotional sales, viral content, or product launches can draw massive attention, quickly consuming server capacity and leading to slowdowns or crashes.
- Security Breaches: Websites are frequent targets of cyberattacks, and successful breaches can cause serious downtime. Attackers may exploit vulnerabilities in software or servers, compromising the website and disrupting its functionality.
- DDoS Attacks: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks overwhelm a website by bombarding it with a massive amount of traffic from multiple sources. This flood of traffic consumes bandwidth and server resources, making the website inaccessible to legitimate users. These attacks are designed to disrupt service and can last for hours or even days, depending on their scale and the effectiveness of the website’s defenses.
How to Prevent Website Downtime (12 Ways)
1. Choose the right hosting provider
There are a couple of choices in business where cutting corners isn’t an option. And your hosting provider is one of them.
We know that when you first start, you might operate on a tight budget. So, going for the cheapest hosting service sounds like an acceptable choice. However, this decision can only lead to more problems down the road.
If you think about it, your whole online business depends on where your files are stored and if they are secure.
That’s why it is critical to invest in a high-quality web hosting provider from the get-go.
But what does “high quality” mean?
When you choose a hosting provider, do not make compromise with the following things:
- High uptime guarantees (preferably 99.99%) to minimize downtime risks
- Scalable hosting plans to grow with your website
- Advanced security measures like DDoS protection, firewalls, and regular malware scans
- Automatic backups to protect your data
- 24/7 world-class support, so if anything goes wrong, they can fix it promptly
Again, all these might come at a higher price, but it most definitely pays back in the long run.
2. Implement continuous website monitoring
The earlier you spot a potential issue, the faster you can resolve it, minimizing disruptions to your site and user experience.
This is where website monitoring tools come into play.
Website monitoring is the process of tracking your website’s performance and availability in real time. It checks key metrics like uptime, loading speed, and response times to ensure your site is functioning as expected and accessible to users.
Continuous monitoring helps prevent downtime by providing instant alerts when issues occur, such as server failures, high traffic loads, or security breaches.
To set up effective monitoring, consider using these popular tools:
- UptimeRobot: Tracks uptime and downtime with customizable alerts.
- Pingdom: Provides real-time monitoring and performance insights.
- Datadog: Offers advanced analytics and server monitoring.
- Site24x7: Combines website monitoring with server and application tracking.
3. Balance the traffic load
Load balancing is distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers to ensure no single server becomes overwhelmed. This technique is essential for maintaining website performance and availability, especially during high-traffic periods such as product launches or seasonal sales.
By directing traffic evenly, load balancing:
- Prevents server overload
- Ensures faster response times
- Reroutes users seamlessly if a server fails, improving overall reliability
If you attract users from all over the world, it’s essential to choose a hosting provider with servers strategically located around the globe. Geographic distribution ensures that visitors are directed to the server nearest to them, reducing latency and providing faster loading speeds, no matter where they are accessing your website from.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) further enhance traffic management by caching your website’s static content on multiple servers worldwide. This reduces the strain on your primary servers and ensures faster delivery of content like images, scripts, and videos. Together, load balancing and CDNs work to improve website speed, reliability, and resilience against traffic surges, minimizing the risk of downtime.
4. Perform regular maintenance and updates
As your business grows, you will start experimenting with various tools, plugins, and software. Over time, these outdated third parties can become vulnerable to security threats or cause compatibility issues, leading to performance problems or even downtime.
By performing routine updates, you ensure your website remains secure, stable, and optimized for peak performance.
Maintenance tasks also include clearing unnecessary files, fixing broken links, monitoring server health, and optimizing databases. These actions help prevent issues before they escalate, ensuring your website continues to function as expected.
Important: Updates should always be tested in a staging environment before applying them to your live site. This ensures compatibility with your existing setup and reduces the risk of unforeseen issues.
5. Optimize website performance
Technically speaking, you can achieve 100% uptime without optimizing your site’s load time and performance. However, there’s this thing called “perceived performance.”
Perceived performance is a subjective measure of website performance, responsiveness, and reliability. In other words, how fast a website seems to the user.
So, although your website is up and running, if it takes 10 seconds to load, users might decide that it’s unavailable and leave.
And beyond keeping users on your website, achieving a stellar performance and fast load times brings some other great benefits like:
- Better page ranking
- Lower ad spends
- Higher engagement
- Increased conversions
So, how do you optimize your site’s performance?
Here’s a quick checklist:
You can either do it manually or rely on several plugins.
Or there’s a third option – NitroPack.
NitroPack is an all-in-one solution that applies more than 60 performance optimizations automatically. So, instead of risking breaking your website by doing manual tweaks or bloating your code with 10 different speed plugins, you can get all the benefits from a single tool.
6. Prepare for traffic surges
While millions of unpredictable things might happen and bring your site down, you can easily plan for traffic surges.
Think about all the campaigns, sales, and product launches you will do throughout the year, and plan accordingly.
What does that mean?
Here’s what you can do to ensure your site can handle sudden traffic spikes:
- Use Scalable Hosting Solutions
Choose a hosting provider that offers scalable resources, such as cloud hosting or elastic scaling. This allows your server capacity to grow dynamically with traffic demands.
- Implement Load Balancing
Distribute incoming traffic across multiple servers to prevent any single server from being overwhelmed. Load balancing improves performance and ensures consistent uptime.
- Leverage Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
CDNs cache static content on global servers, reducing load on your main server and delivering faster experiences for users worldwide. This is particularly helpful during traffic spikes.
- Enable Caching
Use server-side and browser caching to reduce the strain on your server by serving pre-loaded versions of your website. Tools like NitroPack or built-in CMS caching can help optimize performance.
- Optimize Your Website for Speed
Reduce load times by compressing files, optimizing images, and minimizing HTTP requests. A faster website can handle more concurrent users without slowing down.
7. Maintain regular backups
The truth is the longer you run your business, the bigger the chances of experiencing downtime. Again, we humans are prone to errors, so no matter how prepared you are, something might eventually go wrong.
That’s why it’s essential to have a safety net – a backup.
In the event of an unexpected outage or data corruption, having up-to-date backups ensures you can recover your website’s files, databases, and configurations without starting from scratch. Automated backups, stored in secure offsite locations, provide an extra layer of reliability and reduce the risk of permanent data loss.
In other words, you can handle downtimes with confidence, restoring your website quickly and preserving user trust.
8. Keep SSL certificates up-to-date
SSL certificates play a critical role in protecting data, securing online transactions, and ensuring user trust. When an SSL certificate expires, browsers display security warnings that can deter visitors and harm your reputation.
Additionally, search engines may penalize your site, impacting visibility.
To avoid these issues, set up automatic certificate renewal or use reminders to track expiration dates. Keeping your SSL certificates current ensures consistent encryption, protects sensitive information, and prevents disruptions caused by browser security alerts.
9. Don’t let your domain name expire
Your domain is the cornerstone of your online presence, and an expired registration can take your website offline, disrupt user access, and damage your reputation. In worst-case scenarios, someone else could claim your domain.
To prevent this, set your domain to auto-renew or mark renewal dates on your calendar. By staying on top of domain renewals, you ensure your website remains accessible, protect your brand identity, and avoid unnecessary downtime.
10. Choose trusted plugins and themes
Returning to our first point about choosing a high-quality hosting provider, the same rules apply to selecting your plugins and themes.
There are thousands of options out there, and the easiest choice is to go with the free versions. However, installing poorly coded scripts is a surefire way for something to break.
That said, when you’re looking for a plugin or theme, give extra attention to the following:
1. High Number of Installations
Plugins with a high number of active installations (e.g., over 10,000 or 100,000) indicate trustworthiness and widespread use, which often correlates with quality.
2. Regular Updates
Frequent updates show the plugin is actively maintained, compatible with the latest CMS versions, and patched for security vulnerabilities
3. Positive Reviews and High Ratings
Look for plugins with a large number of positive reviews and high ratings, reflecting user satisfaction and reliability.
4. Detailed Documentation
High-quality plugins provide clear, comprehensive documentation to guide installation, usage, and troubleshooting.
5. Responsive Support
Check for responsive customer support or an active community forum to address issues promptly.
6.Good Performance Metrics
A high-quality plugin won’t slow down your website. Look for user feedback on performance or test the plugin's impact using speed tools.
7. Clear Permissions and Transparency
Ensure the plugin doesn’t request unnecessary permissions or collect data without transparency.
11. Develop a disaster recovery plan
Disaster recovery is the process of preparing for and responding to unexpected events. In other words, all ten steps to prevent a website downtime are a disaster recovery strategy.
If you turn this into a well-documented process, you have a Disaster Recovery Plan. Here’s how to build one:
- Identify Potential Risks: Analyze threats like server crashes, malware attacks, or power outages that could affect your website.
- Create a Backup Strategy: Schedule automated backups of your website’s files and databases, storing them securely in multiple locations.
- Define a Recovery Process: Document step-by-step instructions for restoring your website, including team responsibilities and recovery time objectives (RTO).
- Test the Plan Regularly: Conduct mock recovery drills to identify gaps and ensure the plan works as intended.
- Update the Plan: Revise the plan periodically to address new risks, technologies, and business needs.
What to Do If Your Website Is Down
First and foremost, don’t panic.
If you’ve applied the strategies from this article, you are set up for quick recovery.
But the first thing you need to do is go to "Down For Everyone Or Just Me" to confirm if your website is down globally or just for you.
If it turns out that is not just for you, then:
- Check with your hosting provider to see if there are ongoing server issues or scheduled maintenance.
- Review your most recent changes that might have caused the issue. Roll back if necessary.
- Check if your domain and SSL certificate haven’t expired.
- Reach out to your hosting provider’s support team with details about the issue for a quick resolution.
Last, but not least, inform your users about the downtime via social media or email and provide updates on when the issue will be resolved.
Although people are more impatient than ever, they also understand that these things can happen. So, own the situation and be transparent about the issue and how you’re going to resolve it.
FAQs
How can I check if my website is down?
Use uptime monitoring tools like UptimeRobot, Pingdom, or Site24x7 to check if your website is down. Alternatively, visit "Down For Everyone Or Just Me" to see if others are experiencing the issue.
How does website downtime impact my business?
Website downtime disrupts user experience, reduces revenue, and negatively affects SEO rankings. Frequent downtime can hurt your brand’s credibility, resulting in lost customer trust and lower search engine visibility.
How much website downtime is considered acceptable?
For most businesses, an acceptable uptime target is 99.9%, translating to about 8 hours of downtime annually. High-reliability industries may aim for 99.99% uptime or even higher.
What are the best tools for monitoring website uptime?
Top uptime monitoring tools include UptimeRobot, Pingdom, New Relic, and Datadog. These tools offer real-time monitoring, alerts, and performance insights, ensuring you’re instantly notified of any downtime.
Can high traffic cause my website to go down?
Yes, unexpected traffic surges can overload your server, causing website downtime. Load balancing, caching, and scalable hosting plans can help manage traffic spikes and prevent outages.
What should I do if my website is down?
First, check your hosting provider’s status page. Then, review recent changes or updates that might have caused the issue. Contact support if needed, and keep users informed via social media or email.
How often should I back up my website?
Daily backups are ideal for high-traffic sites, while weekly backups work for smaller or static sites. Automated backup tools can ensure regular, reliable backups without manual effort.
