Web monitoring: Why poor website uptime could be your business’s downfall

Website uptime is a bit like your health, you don’t appreciate it until one day it’s gone. Whether you’re a webmaster or a hosting company you’ll know that uptime is important. But have you considered the different ways poor uptime can impact your business?

It’s not too dramatic to say that serious and sustained periods of website downtime can take your business down with it. Even a small amount of downtime can have a direct financial cost to your business.

Monitor uptime or risk losing sales

You’ve done all the hard work. You’ve brought together talented web designers and copywriters to create a great website. You’ve built up inbound links, utilized social media tools like a pro and finally cracked the first page of google for your niche.

Your dream customer searches your dream keywords. They click on your enticing page title after being seduced by your meta description.

But your site fails to load. It’s down. It can be hard work to win a sale, yet so easy to lose one. And this one you just lost. For high traffic, high revenue e-commerce sites, that can mean significant direct lost sales.

Lost website means lost customers

A lost sale from a first-time buyer is one thing. But some of your customers are regular, they come back again and again for your service. If the downtime of a site is serious enough, or regular enough, how do you think these valuable customers feel?

That’s right: three clicks and they’re doing business with your competitor.

And how often do you think customers come back to a site they find down? A gold star if you guessed ‘never again’.

Server downtime damages you credibility

If you’re a web hosting company, in today’s socially connected online world your reputation can be damaged faster than you can say ‘website monitoring’. And in serious enough cases of downtime, this damage can be critical. A web hosting company that gains a reputation for not being able to host websites, doesn’t have the brightest of futures.

And for webmasters, especially those with an e-commerce site, the impact on your reputation can be devastating. Imagine your customer is half-way through your shopping cart process. They’re entering highly personal financial data, and then your site goes down.

Apart from the annoyance of having to complete the process again (which many will not bother to do), what does this do to your credibility? If you can’t keep your site active, will they trust that you can keep their personal data secure?

Poor server uptime can impact your search ranking

It’s not only the human visitors to your site that are affected by poor website uptime. Search engines aim to provide the highest quality links to their users, so their algorithm does not favor sites that regularly go down. For minor periods of downtime, it’s unlikely to have any affect. But if your website is down when the spider visits, it’s going to negatively impact your ranking.

Together these issue can amount to a backward step for your business. So you can start to see the vital importance of monitoring website uptime.