Businesses and personal brands use websites as worldwide storefronts. Websites can also encounter downtime like brick-and-mortar establishments. This post will discuss website downtime and why website owners should prioritize preventing it.
Website Downtime?
The time during which users cannot use a website is called downtime. The cause is frequent server overload, hardware failure, or DDoS attacks. If not handled appropriately, downtime might degrade search engine ranks and miss conversion opportunities.
Why Should Website Downtime Be Prevented?
Website outages can harm your brand’s reputation and finances. Imagine customers arriving on your website to buy and seeing a 503 service unavailable error. They may switch to a competitor, losing you customers. This scenario shows how website unavailability hurts:
Lost revenue: Your eCommerce store will lose sales and revenue the longer it’s down.
Lose Reputation: Visitors that experience regular downtime may lose trust in your brand. Reliable websites demonstrate professionalism and user experience.
Lower rankings: Google ranks websites by uptime and load speeds. Your website’s search ranking may drop due to frequent outages.
Security risks: Downtime makes your website more open to assaults.
These effects show that limiting website downtime is essential to long-term business success.
9 Ways to Avoid Website Downtime
This section covers 9 practical best practices for avoiding website downtime and providing 24/7 access.
1. Pick a Reliable Host
A trustworthy web host is essential since your hosting server affects site availability and performance. With so many hosting services, you must be very careful while choosing. Before buying a hosting provider, consider these factors:
A guarantee of uptime: Your website is always available with reliable hosting. Regular server maintenance and innovative technology reduce downtime.
Site speed: Slow websites irritate visitors. For fast loading and perfect performance, choose a web host with high-speed servers and global data centers.
Excellent security: Cyberattacks can cause disruption, data loss, and legal difficulties. Your website should be protected from any attacks by a reliable hosting provider.
Support 24/7: Hosting services should give email and live chat help in case of issues or outages.
Scalability: Scalable hosting services will help your site handle traffic without downtime or performance difficulties as your business grows.
2. Back Up Regularly
Website outage might compromise your company’s and customers’ account, contact, and transaction data. Customers who are shopping or changing their profiles when your website goes down may lose their unsaved modifications. This will hurt sales and user experience. Regular backups for WordPress and other sites are important for several reasons:
Protection of data: Website data is protected by regular backups. You can swiftly restore the website after a cyber attack, server failure, or inadvertent deletion.
Business continuity: Backups keep your online store running after data loss.
Compliance needs: Customer data protection may be required by industry. Regular backups assist meet compliance obligations.
3. Use Monitors
Website owners can use monitoring tools to assess site functionality and take proactive steps to maintain an online presence. These tools are great for monitoring website uptime and downtime:
UptimeRobot: This freemium application scans your website every five minutes and gives fast alerts if it goes down.
Pingdom: Known for speed testing, Pingdom delivers real-time website monitoring and notifications.
Site24x7: This thorough monitoring tool delivers detailed website performance insights and notifications.
4. Website Performance Optimization
When many users visit your website, the server must work harder to process requests, generate pages, and offer content. Server overload can delay site speed and cause problems. Although not a direct cause of website downtime, speed optimization improves user experience. This covers picture compression, code minification, and browser caching.
5. Use Security
All types of malicious assaults threaten your website’s uptime:
- DDoS assaults flood servers with traffic, crashing your site.
- Data breaches often result from phishing and social engineering. They can damage user trust and force the web host to pull your site down.
- Malware can disable vital website functions. Most require substantial removal and cleanup of compromised pieces, causing website downtime.
- Audits and downtime avoidance are necessary to reduce these risks and secure the website.
6. Effectively handle traffic spikes
Traffic control is essential to avoid downtime, especially during peak usage. These website uptime measures help handle peak traffic:
Track site visitors: To predict surges, use Google Analytics to monitor your site’s performance and traffic trends. Holidays may be high traffic for travel firms.
Optimize database: Indexing and removing superfluous database files speed up queries. This optimizes data storage and retrieval, speeding up loading.
Hosting resource monitoring: Your hosting plan should have enough capacity for traffic spikes. This is crucial for shared hosting, when one dedicated server runs numerous sites.
Allow caching: This method caches static content like photos and stylesheets on users’ devices to reduce server queries.
7. Plan Regular Maintenance
Maintaining website uptime involves constant monitoring. Do not wait for failure or crash. Site checkups and upgrades can prevent downtime and keep it running properly. Set a site maintenance plan and timeline to keep on track. This might be weekly, monthly, or quarterly depending on site complexity. To keep your website running, take these steps:
- Review your website’s health and performance. Find issues like slow loading or security holes.
- Update your CMS, plugins, themes, extensions, and other website software.
- Use PageSpeed Insights or Hostinger’s control panel to test speed.
- Complete website security audits to find and eradicate threats.
- After making changes, check for broken links, missing images, formatting mistakes, and other issues during maintenance.
- Keep accurate records of your maintenance work, including dates and revisions. This documentation can help with future site maintenance and troubleshooting.
- Create a landing page to advise visitors of scheduled maintenance and projected duration if server disruption occurs.
8. Install safe themes and plugins
WordPress themes and plugins add functionality and design aspects to sites, making them more appealing and user-friendly. However, obsolete themes and plugins can undermine website security. Hackers can access your site’s backend through these weaknesses, stealing data and causing outages. Follow these tips before installing a WordPress theme or plugin for maximum security:
Download from trusted sites: Use WordPress’s official directory or ThemeForest to buy themes and plugins. Avoid free themes and plugins from untrusted platforms.
Read ratings and reviews: Online testimonials might reveal a theme or plugin’s security and performance.
Regularly check updates: Please ensure your themes and plugins have been updated within six months. Developers who actively maintain their products handle security vulnerabilities faster.
Before using, test: Make a staging environment for security scans and compatibility checks to protect the live production site.
Uninstall themes and plugins you no longer need. In addition to security threats, dormant themes and plugins use server resources and slow your site.
9. Plan for Disaster Recovery
Even with all the downtime prevention methods, security events can still occur. Create a disaster recovery plan (DRP) to secure your website data. So how:
Determine essential assets and risks: List all key corporate assets, including data, hardware, and software. Consider server outages, cyberattacks, natural calamities, and human error.
Set recovery goals: Set your recovery time target (RTO) for system restoration and recovery point objective (RPO) for tolerable data loss in an incident.
Team up for disaster recovery: DRP coordinators, IT staff, and communication liaisons should have particular duties. Make sure your crew knows their roles.
Strategize recovery: Risk severity and repercussions should be prioritized. Next, detail risk mitigation procedures for each scenario.
Backup your data: Automate crucial data and system backups. Store them securely to avoid data loss in calamities.
Update the plan regularly: Update your DRP as technology, threats, and business demands change. Revise the plan to address shortcomings and improvements.
Generate documentation: One document should contain your DRP’s contact information, protocols, and recovery techniques. Make it accessible to the DRP staff.
Website Downtime Causes:
Hardware failure, cyberattacks, and other things cause website crashes:
Also Read Our Article On “How to Keep Your Website Safe: A Thorough Guide“
Issues with servers:
Users cannot access websites hosted on a downed server. There are two main server outage causes:
The hardware: Hard disk failures, unreliable power sources, overheating CPUs, and aged components.
The software: It can be caused by software bugs, faulty operating systems, insufficient RAM, inappropriate setups, and database connection failures.
Software Update Errors:
Security and performance depend on software upgrades. However, compatibility difficulties, incorrect installation, and program conflicts may cause update errors.
Traffic Rises:
Server resources might be overwhelmed by traffic spikes, sometimes triggered by abrupt visitor increases. If your hosting infrastructure can’t handle these spikes, your website will delay or go offline.
Breach of security:
When hackers break into your site, they might disrupt services, damage pages, or steal data. These events can be prevented by securing your website with firewalls and two-factor authentication.
DDoS Attacks:
Attackers utilize botnets or hijacked devices to create huge bandwidth. The purpose is to overload the server and disable your site.
Conclusion:
Websites help companies sell globally. Server difficulties, traffic spikes, and DDoS assaults can crash websites, disrupting operations. Implement these site upkeep best practices that are mentioned in this article to maintain website uptime.