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Website Downtime and What to Do About It

By Danielle Livy
October 11, 2018
IT Service Management
plan major incidents itsm
  Website downtime is frustrating for anyone that depends upon your site for anything. Downtime is especially troubling for E-commerce websites, but it can affect any website and it can occur for a variety of reasons. Website downtime can bring your business to a complete standstill and eat up your IT resources as you deploy your team to uncover the issues that lead to the downtime and you find a way to fix them.   Furthermore, website downtime, while most obvious when the entire site goes down, is often hidden in backend issues that affect the usability of the site, while preserving the site’s general appearance. For this and other reasons, website downtime can be a serious challenge to track, costing your business serious revenue and affecting your customers’ and competitors’ perception of your overall business. Because of this, your IT team needs to have a website downtime strategy in place. It’s not a matter of if your website will be affected, but when.

Website Downtime Affects All Sites

One of the challenges of living in a connected, digital world is that we’ve come to depend upon that connectivity to access information and other resources. In the process, we have become less than forgiving when websites do not function in the manner that we have come to expect. Whereas website downtime was once a problem primarily for consumer-facing digital assets, it now affects all companies across all industries, as more of the business of doing business has moved online. If your company has been incredibly lucky and you have not suffered one or more considerable downtime episodes, it is only a matter of time before you’ll need a solid downtime strategy.   

Website Downtime Is a Major Challenge to Track

There are many factors that can trigger or contribute to website downtime. These factors include surges in traffic beyond what your resources can handle, errors made by your team, network issues, and even cyberattacks of various kinds. Additionally, as mentioned above, aspects of website downtime may not always be completely obvious or trigger a complete website meltdown. Many times, aspects of your site may be working quite well – the appearance of the site may look just fine, but it’s masking issues your visitors are having with buttons, forms, and other functional aspects of your web presence.

Website Downtime Can Be Costly in Many Ways

Yes, especially for E-commerce sites, the most troubling aspect of website downtime is its direct revenue cost. But there are several other ways that website issues can potentially cost your company money. Chief among these costs is the resources it takes to repair issues to the site, and the labor involved with not only fixing the problem(s) but also the time taken away from the other tasks your team may currently be working on. There are also many potential opportunity costs associated with downtime, including the damage website downtime issues can cause your reputation with current and potential customers, partner organizations, and your competitors and collaborators.

How to Minimize Website Downtime Through Website Uptime Monitoring and Other Tools

Thankfully, there are many tools that can help you react quickly to issues with your website and even prevent them from happening in the first place. Website uptime monitoring tools can help you monitor and track your sites performance, help you automate aspects of your routing and priority, help you draw the connections between problems, incidents, and root causes – all while helping to keep you up and running. For more tips on reducing downtime, read to see how leveraging the cloud could be a solution for your company.
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Danielle Livy
Danielle is the Senior Director, Marketing, ITSM at SolarWinds. She has wide-ranging experience in content production, social media marketing, public relations, and brand messaging. Her…
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