How Websites Benefit from Superior Uptime Performance

In the current consumer driven society availability of a website is important to have any chance of success. A business website is not only a source of information it is many a time a source of income. So, if a site is down 100% of the visitors are turned away. It is similar to closing the door of a brick and mortar store. If users encountered repeated outages, they will perceive either the website they are trying to reach does not exist or will fail to meet their expectations.

Different studies have revealed that 9 out of 10 web visitors switch to a competitor’s site if a company’s website fails to load. Even the slow performing websites irritate the users and they rarely return back to such sites in the future. The effect of frequent outages is thus extremely detrimental from a business point of view.

Monitoring Uptime and Site Performance

It is very important to monitor a site’s availability and performance, but, how to do it? Uptime monitoring is not just simply checking whether your site is available or not. The website may be available from a particular region but may be down at some other region. For businesses having global user base, you need to keep track of your website’s availability and performance from around the world. For a global site, it is always a peak e-commerce time somewhere in the world. If your website goes down at 5a.m. in the US coast, it may not bother majority of the American shoppers. However, that time is 11a.m. in Central Europe and 9p.m. in Sydney. So, this becomes a real problem. You will need a dedicated uptime monitoring service provider to keep a watch on your website availability and performance round the clock.

How Good Uptime Helps?

How critical is your website for the business? Answer to that question will help you understand how important your site uptime is. If your website is main channel of sales, its availability is most important. When the eCommerce giant Amazon’s site became unavailable for 40 minutes in 2013, the company lost an average of $4.72 million in sales. Even if your company is not as big as Amazon, still you are going to lose sales if your site is unavailable.

If your website is there to attract new customers and serve the existing ones, you will need to avoid downtime in order to retain or gain the customers’ trust. A purely informational website with no monetization program is not financially affected with outages. Still it cannot be down for a prolonged period. It may not only cost their search engine ranking and will have a negative impact on consumers’ experience.

Good uptime means happy customers and increased sales, increased profit and maintaining good rank positions in search engine results.

How to Ensure 100% Uptime?

Maintaining 100% uptime is never possible over a long period of time. No provider can give you that guarantee. So, your website will go down at some point of time. You need to choose a service provider guaranteeing maximum uptime. When your site goes down or faces slightest problem, they must inform you in no time. Knowing there is a problem with your site is only half the battle won. An experienced service provider will help you to deal with the situation in a systematic way so that the site is restored to functional state in shortest period of time.