Ways to Maximize Your Website Uptime

In the world of online business, downtime reduces profits. Exactly how much money each minute of downtime costs varies from one website to the next and some website’s losses are harder to measure than others, but one thing remains the same across the board… Website downtime equates to lost profits and no company can afford to just throw money out the window when they could save that money by implementing a few simple measures. Here are some simple ways to maximize your website’s uptime, ensuring that the profits lost to downtime are minimized.

1. Cut Back on Front-End Complexity

When building a site, know your SPOFs (Single Point of Failure). Every single asset on your website, whether it be an image or a CSS file, is a SPOF. While a small image that fails to load may not bring your site down for the count, other site assets can indeed create a total outage of your website or at least kill the user experience. For example, let’s say that a JavaScript executes a blocking behavior, this prevents all of your site’s assets after it from loading. If this script loads quickly everything goes well. If, however, the script happens to fail, then the rest of your site won’t be able to load, leading to dreaded website downtime. Much in the same way, a bad CSS file can alter the appearance of your entire website. This is why one of the best ways to avoid downtime and maximize your website uptime is to limit the amount of SPOFs on your site. The fewer complexities your site possesses, the more likely it is that things will run smoothly.

2. Ensure That Third Party Applications Load Asynchronously

More and more of today’s websites are integrated with third-party content, such asocial media and news feeds. When developing your site, make sure that any third-party JavaScript assets load asynchronously instead of running synchronously. This will ensure that, if the third-party script fails, it does not cause a blocking behavior, taking your entire website down with it. If your third-party provider crashes, your proprietary content will continue to load as long as the third-party asset loads asynchronously. While your site may not be fully functional if this happens, at least you won’t experience a full website outage.

3. Utilize a Website Monitoring Service

One of the best ways to maximize your website uptime is to be notified of any website downtime the moment it occurs. The sooner you find out about your website’s performance issues or an instance of downtime, the sooner you can get to work fixing the problem. With a quality website monitoring service in place, you can go to work fixing the issue almost the moment it happens since you will be notified of the downtime within seconds of it occurring. Since every minute that your site remains down is costing your business money, the sooner you know about your downtime and get your site back up and running, the sooner you can stop the hemorrhage of profits that website downtime causes.