Unavailability of your website
Showcase of your company, what if your website was unavailable?
Hateful for many professionals, in addition to losing potential customers, it strongly harms your brand.
If the outage turns out to be more serious than expected, your site could be unavailable for several days and your customers, new or loyal, could then turn to the competition.
The consequences of a broken website
Showcase site, blog or worse: e-commerce site… the consequences of a failure of your site can have serious repercussions in the short and long term.
Among these consequences, the loss of traffic. First impact of the failure of your site, it becomes inaccessible, and you lose all the traffic and therefore your visibility on the Internet.
Your image loses credibility: an inaccessible site sends a bad image to Internet users. And the consequences are all the more serious for e-commerce sites which aim above all to build trust in order to keep and retain their customers.
It seems obvious that the financial loss is added to these heavy consequences: loss of visibility, loss of turnover and potentially costs to find the origin of the breakdown by calling a professional.
The SEO, or natural referencing, will also be affected by this unavailability of your web pages. Search engines offer Internet users sites that meet their demands but also their requirements. A too long loading time or errors on your pages will not be to their taste. The bounce rate will be higher and the user experience will lose its quality. Factor taken into account for your positioning on the list of search results.
What causes a website to be unavailable?
There are many reasons why your website may be down.
We will discuss the most common reasons:
- Web hosting: the first point you need to consider. Speaking of web hosting and outages, we think of OVH which, in early 2021, suffered a heavy fire in its data centers. Many sites had been unavailable for several days and some were never able to be put back online.
Low quality web hosting can also be a cause of downtime. Some hosting providers overuse their servers, too many sites are hosted on the same one and this causes slowdowns, or worse: unavailability.
- Traffic overload: when you put it that way, you might have stars in your eyes… but if your site is not prepared for it, it’s a disaster.
An abnormal increase in traffic on your site can trigger 500 errors, or even a complete crash!
So be careful during special events such as sales. Check your server capabilities and update your site.
- Hacking attempts: unfortunately, nobody is safe from hackers anymore. hackers. To prevent this, you must adopt simple rules, update your site to ensure its security, use strong pass words and change them regularly, use a firewall and of course: always have an updated back up of your site.
- Problems related to the CMS: your CMS is your content management system, for example: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla etc.
Updates are regularly requested with all these softwares, but sometimes it is the drama… an error slips somewhere, an incompatibility, the reasons are multiple and cause the failure of your site.
- Your domain name: have you thought about renewing it? The domain names you buy do not belong to you for life.
They are generally owned by you for a period of 1 to 10 years, renewable. Consider the auto-renewal option if you’re a headcase, otherwise a simple reminder on your calendar will do the trick.
Protecting your website from failure
There is no way to protect your site 100% from an outage. But you can save yourself some hassle by implementing the following best practices:
- Choose your web hosting carefully and opt for a dedicated server if your site is large or if it is your primary source of income.
- Put in place a maximum of security, with specific modules, SSL certificate, firewalls…
- Make the updates that your site requires without delay. Some of them fix important security holes. Check your site after these updates to make sure everything is working properly.
And most importantly: make regular backups of your site. Don’t hesitate to call on a professional to manage your website’s security, updates and backups.
If your site goes down, the only way to recover it quickly and without damage is to have a backup of it (in several places): a back-up.
Do you need more information? Please contact us.
