Impact of Website Downtime on Your Business

If you own a website, there's no way you can ensure that it'll be working round the clock, 24X7, all through the year. It might be a great website, sharing content that really matters to people. It may even have extremely high traffic. However, that does not mean your website won't have an occasional downtime. Yes, even your website might crash. Sometimes, it may take a while to fix some issue that occurs to the site and make the site available again. It is important to prepare for such a downtime situation. Your goal should be to prevent the downtime to the extent possible and where it is not possible to reduce the time the website was down

Downtime Has Negative Consequences

No matter how popular your website is, downtime is surely going to have a negative impact. The best option is to avoid or reduce downtime. Here's a quick look at some of the negative impacts of website downtime. 

Financial Damage for Your Business

How much traffic does your business website experience on a regular basis? Is the website accustomed to really heavy traffic? Then you're likely to lose out on a huge chunk of traffic. If you’re selling some stuff through the website, the downtime is going to impact the sales as well. The result: your profits are going to get affected. Hence, if you don’t address the issue of website downtime quite early, your business is likely to face continued financial damage.

Dip for Your Business Website in Search Engine Results

How does your website rank in the search engine results? If you’re looking to ensure that more and more people come to know about your business through the internet, it is important that your website attracts a large amount of traffic. However, for that, it is important for the site to rank really high on the search engine result pages. And that takes a lot of work for that. However, if your site is down for a long time, your search engine rankings may take a hit. It means that your website will not be available to the search engines ranking results. The result: your target audience won’t be able to find the site at the top of SERPs. Less number of people will be visiting your site due to this, which will have a negative impact on your business.

Loss of Credibility and Customer Base for Your Business

It takes a lot of effort to create a customer base for a business and an even greater effort to maintain it. If your website is down for a long time, the visitors to your website are going to be disappointed. As a result, they might not return again. Besides, it is also going to cause a loss of the credibility you had built over the years. Hence, it’s important to ensure that you solve the issues of website downtime as early as possible.

Dealing with Website Downtime

Your website is the face of your business to the customers. Hence, it’s important that you keep the site up and running as much as possible. However, there may be times when your site may be down. You need to find ways to shorten this time. Also, it is good to have a message that clearly communicates your site is having a problem. This message indicates you are aware of the problem and are working on a solution to resolve that situation.