Website Uptime and Performance: What Consumers Expect of Your Business Website in 2020

The Internet has become an increasingly integral part of our everyday lives. Consumers access websites from an array of mobile devices at all hours. When a consumer goes to a website, they expect that site to be up and performing properly. There have long been statistics on what consumers expect in terms of website speeds and performance as well as numerous discussions and studies regarding how much website downtime costs a company. Now that we have entered 2020, it’s evident that consumers aren’t becoming any more patient when it comes to doing business online. What do consumers expect from your website in 2020? Here are some interesting facts that emphasize that it is now more important than ever for online businesses to minimize website downtime and maintain the highest levels of website performance to ensure ongoing success.

How Patient Are Consumers in 2020?

Research has shown that approximately 50 percent of consumers expect a webpage to load within 2 seconds or less. If a webpage fails to load within 3 seconds, more than 50 percent of consumers will abandon the website for a competitor site. This poses a serious threat to businesses both large and small. No one can afford to drive traffic away to their competitors. If your site isn’t performing up to par, you risk losing half of your website visitors as they opt to do business with a competitor rather than wait for your site’s pages to load. In light of this information, it becomes evident that it is crucial that you not only monitor your site’s uptime in 2020, but that you also monitor your site’s performance to avoid losing sales and customers due to slowly-loading web pages. 

How Much Downtime Are Websites Experiencing?

When shopping for a hosting provider, everywhere you go will see those providers touting guarantees of 99.99 percent uptime. Unfortunately, very few fail to deliver on that promise. While those guarantees are indeed in place, the hosting providers won’t compensate you for your actual losses should downtime occur. In light of this you need to ask yourself, does your hosting provider really have the incentive necessary to eliminate as much downtime as possible? If your site goes down, instead of compensating you for your actual losses, your hosting provider will only compensate you for the amount you paid for hosting for the amount of time that your website was down.  For example, if you pay $30 a month for website hosting and your hosting provider causes your business to go down for a full day, that provider is only obligated to refund you approximately $1. Obviously, your online business stands to lose much more than $1 if a full day of website downtime were to occur. When shopping for a hosting provider, make sure that you take these guarantees with a grain of salt and do research into the reputation of the hosting provider you have or are thinking of utilizing. In 2019, websites averaged approximately 3 hours of website downtime a month due to host downtime issues. The same research shows that hosting providers only averaged uptime of approximately 99.6 percent on average and had 760 instances of website downtime over the course of the year. That actually adds up to more than a 24-hour day of website downtime over the course of the year. In 2020, if you want to truly minimize the downtime your website experiences, you need to be very careful who your website is partnering with from the company you choose to host your site to the website monitoring service you utilize to mitigate your downtime losses. 

The Importance of Quality Hosting and Tools to Fight Website Downtime 

In 2020 quality website hosting, quality website monitoring services, and the ability to mitigate damage from website downtime is more important than ever before. A growing number of small businesses continue to increasingly conduct business online. One study consisting of 101 start-up companies showed that 29 percent of start-ups fail as a result of running out of capital. When one considers how costly downtime can be to any business, it becomes evident that preventing website downtime (or at least minimizing the length of an outage when downtime does hit) may realistically mean the difference between the failure or success of a start-up. 

It is also important to note that while the dollar-loss-per-minute of start-ups may seem like nothing when compared to the money lost when sites like Amazon go down, the damage can be more devastating when downtime hits a small business or a start-up. It is also important to understand that one of the largest costs of website downtime is a loss of productivity and a loss of customers – something small business just can’t afford. 

What Are Your First Steps in 2020?

The need to protect your business from website downtime has not diminished in the New Year. If anything, it is more important than ever to take any and all measures necessary to protect your online business from the damages that website downtime can cause. First and foremost, ensure that you are partnered with a quality website monitoring service that not only alerts you the moment your site goes down, but also alerts you when your site starts experiencing performance issues. Once you have website monitoring in place, make sure you keep an eye on any downtime that is being caused by your hosting provider. If your hosting provider isn’t living up to its uptime guarantees or is causing problems with the performance of your site, it’s time to start shopping around for a new provider. The goal should be to maximize your site’s uptime and put your online business in the best possible position for success in 2020.