Layman’s Guide to Website Downtime

What is your most important digital asset? Yes, you have guessed it right. It is nothing other than your website. This is sometimes forgotten. As new digital assets have grown, companies have created their social media profiles on the various providers.

Why Your Website and its Uptime is Important?

Your website is what you use as a one-stop resource to house various kinds of information - be it textual, visual or audio. Further, it’s the place to share information related to your brand or business. The website is one resource where you can exercise lot of control in communicating about your products, services and company.  This is not true of social media websites, where almost everybody has equal control and since there are more outsiders than insiders the amount of control on the communication is restricted.

Further, multiple departments and functions use the website for different purposes. Service department need the website to allow existing customers to contact them.  Sales department need the site to share product or service information.  When your website is down it hurts many people inside and outside your company related to your business.

Overall, the website serves many functions:

• A useful resource for your target audience online.
• Gives a good impression of your business.
• If it is user friendly with good navigation, it helps the stake holders to complete their work on the site easily.

No wonder, developing a website is not any child’s play and you need to balance multiple points of view in order to develop a great site.  Your site will need content that is original, insightful and helpful to the client. The site needs to have some interactive capacity including an ability to contact you and your team members. The site needs to be fast and it needs to have lot of visual appeal through images and videos.

Problem of Website Downtime

After much effort you have put up your website.  One fine day, you get user feedback either on digital, or elsewhere on the web, or get to hear it from someone who has been trying to access your site, that your site is not accessible. As a business owner, what you need to realize is that your site being down could be negatively perceived by different stakeholders. Further, this could result in varying degrees of damage to your brand reputation both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Website Downtime – Issues from Various Perspectives

When your website is down, there is some potential glitch or an issue that is preventing your site from loading when users are requesting your site to load.

What this means for your business is that during the time that your site is down, a potential visitors could have made a purchase decision in favor of your business. This is now lost and in many cases that opportunity does not come back again. 

When your website is down, there is a thought process that gets triggered in the minds of the prospective or current customers. They could perceive that your organization or business is neglectful of your website and does not take enough efforts for maintaining the health of its primary digital asset.  Such negative perceptions can cause behaviors including causing the customers to check some other brands that offers this same service or product. 

Conclusion

If you are the business owner taking chances with things that can substantially reduce profit for your business goodbye is the last thing that you might want to do. Hence, ensuring that your website does not go down must always be your primary focus area.  

Now for the sake of maintaining website uptime you cannot keep neglecting other areas.  The solution is to hire a robust, reliable and accurate website monitoring service that continuously monitors your website and informs you immediately when your site is down. Thereby, allowing you to confidently do other functions with the reassurance that in case there is an issue with the website you will be immediately informed.  This peace of mind or reassurance is the major benefit and primary reason for paying for a website monitoring service.