Why Having Good Website Uptime is Important?

Uptime measures the time a website is up and running online. This is a technical definition which is quite easy to understand. But, what you must also know is the importance of uptime for your business. Whether you are a multinational corporation, small business, retailer, blogger or an e-commerce platform- if the web traffic cannot reach your site, for all practical purposes your online business channel is closed. That explains why site uptime, the percentage of time a site is available to internet users, is an important metric for a website.

For the past few years, organizations are striving to ensure that the web users can access their site 100% of the time as a quarterly or yearly goal. However, this is goal is hard to achieve and requires both preparation and some luck. Companies, big or small, at some point time face the problem of downtime. There are numerous causes that can cause a website to go down. A recent survey among small and midsized companies reveals that the leading causes of downtime are:

• Hardware failures
• Software failures
• Human errors and
• Natural disasters

To understand how uptime contributes to a healthy business, you need to realize how downtime negatively affects a business. Your organization will likely to lose on several dimensions due to website downtime.

Sales and Revenue Are Affected If Site Uptime is Not Good

As already mentioned at the beginning of this write-up, sales will come to a halt when your website is down. As the users can no longer access your webpages, your online business will come to a grinding halt. This is a major concern if your business solely or majorly depends on online sales. This will obviously result in loss of revenue. World’s biggest online retailer Amazon’s website remained down for almost 13 minutes in 2016. The outage has cost the company a loss of $2 million per minute.

Those businesses not solely dependent on their web presence also suffer some form of monetary loss when their site is down.

Customer Trusts and Loyalty Takes a Hit Due To Lack of Website Uptime

It does not matter how good your website design is, how effective your promotions are and how well the content is written. If your site goes down often or takes a long time to load, all your efforts spent to create an exceptional site will be in vain. When potential customers visit your site for the very first time and find that it is unavailable, they will likely never return. Even the most loyal customers do not hesitate to visit your competitor’s site which is just a click away. A 2017 survey conducted among 1000 UK consumers by Wirehive, a digital agency hosting specialist, revealed that 68% of them are negatively affected by web downtime.

Search Engine Rank Positions Can Fall Due To Consistent Site Uptime Failure

If your site remains inaccessible often, Search engines will notice that. Your website’s rank positions may be negatively affected in the search engine result pages, if your web site experiences downtime often. On the contrary, maintaining a good site uptime statistics can make your website rank better in the search results. Better ranks obviously mean more traffic.

Uptime Monitoring is Recommended to Protect your Online Business

A website downtime creates a barrier to online goals your business is trying to achieve. Therefore, it is necessary to have a fast performing website with practically no web-site downtime. You can take help of uptime monitoring tools. If tracking uptime manually is becoming difficult, sign-up for a website monitoring service. The professionals will notify you whenever your site goes down or faces loading issues. You can then use that notification to act promptly to restore your website’s uptime.