When building a website, performance is highly important. Yes, you may have an impressive and appealing design, yet, your website takes time to load or experiences downtime in a frequent manner. That’s a big NO for your visitors. Keep in mind that your website carries your brand, thus, your site’s aesthetics and overall performance must be optimal to meet the needs and expectations of your visitors. Otherwise, don’t be surprised when you see your site’s bounce rate skyrocket and a decrease in your conversion rate.
On the other hand, the prevention of your website’s downtime is vital to ensure optimum performance. There are various ways to do it and here are the major resolutions you can work on to effectively deal with website downtime and in the long run, prevent it from happening.
The first thing that you need to do is to determine what caused the website’s downtime. Various reasons can cause this to happen such as server overload, software failure, hardware failure, traffic overload, and malicious cyber attack. Understanding the cause can also help you prevent it from happening again in the future.
In order to properly manage the downtime, you need to set up monitoring. You can either opt for free or premium software to send an alert when your website is down. Pingdom, Uptime, and Uptime Robot are few of the monitoring tools that you could use. Using these tools, you’ll get automatic reports and email notifications when your site goes down and diagnose the disruptions that are impacting our website.
When your site is experiencing a downtime, it’s important that your users or visitors are aware of it. Thus, setting up a downtime page is essential to notify your visitors that you’ll be back soon and that they won’t simply see a blank page. Putting an error notification such as “Website maintenance” or the like, would be helpful in keeping your credibility among your users.
One of the major reasons why a website performance issues is the traffic overload from social media. As such, effective management of social media needs to be given attention. You might want to keep the mood light at some point while making sure that your site’s traffic is still doing what’s expected of it. Whatever you do, always be open and transparent about your website’s downtime.
Site speed matters - always keep that in mind. Users exit the page if it doesn’t load immediately after they visit it. Let’s say your site takes 10 seconds to load. You can expect that visitors will not wait for the site to load completely. Thus, you must also work on improving your website’s speed. Caching plugins and files, minimizing CSS and HTML requests, improving bandwidth, and switching servers are some of the things that you can do to improve your site’s speed.
It may not be the first time that you’ve heard this, but backing up your site regularly is a critical approach to boost your site’s performance. Aside from that, it is your best method to save copies of your site often and automatically in any event that your site experiences downtime. So, when you’re facing server problems or a cyber attack, having a backup can help you restore all your recent and relevant data when your site returns to life.
A cybersecurity or malware attack can cause a website’s downtime and can be risky if not prevented at all. Now, cybercriminals can implement numerous tactics to bring your site down and gain access to sensitive information that they can take advantage of. When this happens, data breach can cause you bigger problems - or a fortune. Hence, increasing your site’s security such as installing security plugins and following security best practices can save you from any security concerns.
If you encounter any issues that you can’t handle on your own, be willing to reach out to support. Regardless of the issue, you can always ask assistance to diagnose, or handle the issues. For example, you are having issues with your hosting, then, immediately seek assistance from their support team to fix the issue swiftly. Plus, it can help prevent the issue from taking place again in the future.
A CND (Content Delivery Network) is a layer between a site’s server and its users which supports high availability and performance, making it easier to access the website. Now, employing a CDN means that even if your site is down, users can still access the content. can act as a buffer during times of peak traffic, and can help to deter any DDoS attacks.
Last, but definitely not the least, switching to a different web host can resolve website downtime and prevent it from happening again. A solid host can handle either a steady traffic volume or huge spikes in traffic while making sure that technical issues are dealt with accordingly. A reliable web hosting provider can help you identify the problem a lot more quickly and offer solutions on-the-spot.
April is an Editor at Scoopfed, contributor at Hubpages and has been an enthusiast of food articles. She previously worked at a BPO Company and now enjoying her job as an SEO specialist at [MJwebs]...
