Three Steps You Can Take to Minimize Website Downtime

There is nothing quite as stressful as seeing your site go offline – especially if all of your business's profits are driven by your website. While downtime is, for the most part, an inevitable fact of life, there are steps you can take to minimize the downtime your site experiences. The following three steps will not completely eliminate downtime, but they will help ensure that you are taking proper measures to maximize your site's uptime.

Compress Whenever Possible

One of the major factors that contribute to website downtime are CPU resources. If your site is hosted on a shared server, going over the limits that you are allocated will cause your site to go down. Shared servers and private cloud servers provide limited resources due to the fact that the resources are being shared by multiple website owners. Ensuring that your site does not use more resources than necessary means compressing as many of your site's files as possible.

Compressing files means reducing the file size and, therefore, reducing the resources used by those files. Some of the files that you can compress include .css script files, images, videos, and JavaScript files. If your site does go down due to CPU resources being drained, hosting providers are more easily able to restore compressed files, meaning your site will go back up more quickly if your site's files are compressed.

Employ Quality Website Monitoring Services

Monitoring the performance of your server and the uptime of your website is crucial. A quality website monitor will not only alert you immediately if your site does go down, but the service can also help you determine the exact cause of an outage. Without a monitoring service in place, knowing when your site is down or is experiencing performance issues can be a daunting if not impossible task. It can also make it harder to determine the cause of an outage, meaning that it will take you longer to find the issue and get your site back up and running. With website monitoring solutions in place, you'll be the first to know when a website outage occurs and will be able to address the outage effectively.

Be Ready to Take Immediate Action

While you may not be able to completely avoid downtime, you can minimize the potential damage that downtime can cause. To do this you must be ready to take immediate action when downtime does occur. Make sure you have measures in place and strategic plans to address downtime when it does happen. These measures may include moving your site to a secondary hosting provider if the problem is with your web host, communicating with your customers using social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter regarding the nature of the downtime and when the site is expected to be back up, and having backup copies of your site ready to go if the outage is due to a data loss. When you have measures in place to address downtime before it happens, the impact the downtime will actually have can be kept to a minimum.