Partial Website Downtime: Are All of Your Website's Pages Working?

We all know the importance of website uptime and how harmful website downtime can be, but what some don't realize is that even a partial outage of your site can equate to significant losses as well, as a follower of Alertra pointed out recently. If even just one page of your site goes down, one link doesn't work properly, it can have a drastic impact on profits.

When Your Customers Want to Buy but Can't

The Alertra follower mentioned above had signed up for a free trial of a service called DocuSign. This individual frequently needs to sign contracts and have contracts signed. Printing and signing and scanning contracts can be quite the hassle, and DocuSign would significantly increase his efficiency. He was very impressed with the service, even after just one day, and decided that he wanted to upgrade right then and there. The only problem is, when he clicked the link on the site that said, "Upgrade Now", the link brought him to an error page telling him the page could not be found.

Here is an example of a customer practically wanting to throw money at a business, signing up for a service before the free trial even expired, but not being able to do so because the site wasn't functioning properly. If this isn't an example of how significant partial website downtime can be, we don't know what is. After this experience the customer questioned if he should even try contacting the company. After all, he figured, if they couldn't make their own purchase page available to the public how could he trust the company with his vital contracts and other important documents?

Partial Website Downtime is Still Downtime

If you are only monitoring your site's homepage or a few of your site's core pages, it is not enough. You need to be monitoring every single page of your website to ensure maximized profits and success. Partial website downtime can, as we can see from the example above, lead to lost sales and a serious decrease in customer confidence. Had website monitoring been in place to alert the company in question that the specific page was down, the IT department could have gone to work to fix the problem and the company would have had at least one more customer. Who knows how many others ran into the same problem, significantly impacting the company's bottom line?

When you put website monitoring service to work for you, make sure the service monitors each and every page of your website. Anything less is not enough. Even partial website downtime can significantly impact your business, its reputation, and its profits.