With today’s technology, businesses and professionals can spread their wings more easily and explore more of the world. That is, because of our internet access, these businesses and professionals have the chance to reach and connect with more people outside of their physical community and capacity. Social media and website marketing, their target audience, and prospective client base. Thus, the role of a website for any type of business or professional - whether big or small is vital. It serves as their avenue to not only impress but also directly address the opportunities and concerns that come their way. For them to lose this avenue, even just for a matter of hours or minutes, can cause problems and dents in their path to success. This is what this article is all about: Website downtime. We would not just be telling you what is website downtime. We will also be telling you all about the reasons for it happening so you can track the website downtime of your website and how to avoid it altogether.
What is Website Downtime?
Website downtime refers to when a certain website is inaccessible to its intended users (they cannot open the site) or is not functioning as it was intended to (users cannot perform the main activities of the website). As its name suggests, the website is down - failing to fulfill its purpose. And this can very well affect the overall performance of the business and/or portfolio that this website represents. You can lose potential clients and customers and risk upsetting the already existing ones because your website is not cooperating well with what they want. Website downtime - especially prolonged ones can also cause your search engine ranking to go lower, your reputation to be varnished with disapproval, and your customers to move on to another. In short, it can cause serious dents in your business revenue. This is why you need to understand and know how to track website downtime and prevent it.
Both inaccessibility of the website itself and broken functionality of the website features can describe what a website downtime is. And here are some explanations of why it happens - the reasons for website downtime (and some brief explanation about them):
- Human Errors. Sometimes, the website downtime is caused by something that programmers or developers do or edit in the coding. This error in the code is almost always impossible to catch, so it is tough to also avoid the website downtime it causes. With the thousands of lines of coding in a particular site, website downtime or tiny glitches caused by an error in the code are almost unavoidable, and the best answer is to fix it as soon as you catch it.
- Maintenance Oversight. Creating a website takes work, but your responsibility does not stop once you’ve published your site. To prevent website downtime, you have to thoroughly and regularly check if everything is working right on your website. Maintenance of your website is a critical step in ensuring that your customers and site audience are getting the best possible content from you and in making sure that you avoid website downtime in the future.
- Domain Name System (DNS) errors. DNS is what translates your domain name into IP addresses so that browsers can connect to your server. Thus, if your DNS hosting provider is unreliable, you can have many problems with your website speed and security and eventually cause website downtime. Finding the best hosting provider will help you to avoid these problems. If you can avoid it, do not settle for shared hosting and just pay for a fully managed hosting provider of your own.
- Hardware Problems. No matter how advanced today's technology is, we are still vulnerable to power outages and equipment failures. Once your equipment fails, it usually also triggers website downtime. Thus, the best way to prevent website downtime caused by these hardware failures is to always be diligent and prompt in the maintenance and protection of your hardware. Cover all your bases but always be ready in case of an unexpected problem. Pro tip: Have backup hardware incorporated into your system to quickly identify and/or reverse system problems and avoid website downtime frequency in the long run.
- Hacks and Attacks. What we mentioned above are normal problems causing website downtime that no one really wants and intends. With cyber-attacks, a person or a group targets your site and aims to bring it down. They could flood your servers, penetrate your security system and override page access, change the IP address of your site, etc. - all of which are reasons for website downtime. And the only way you can prevent website downtime caused by these hackers is to upgrade your cybersecurity to the best that there is today. Make sure that your website is not prone or vulnerable to any kinds of attacks.
How to Avoid Website Downtime?
Besides what we briefly discussed earlier, while discussing the reasons for website downtime, here are three additional tips on how to prevent website downtime:
- Back-up Your Site. To have a contingency plan is to always be ready to solve the problem and fix it. And with the problem of website downtime, one of the best contingency plans you should have in place is to have a backup of your site. Backing up your site won’t just help you get your website up and running again immediately. It will also help ensure you don’t lose any information after a website downtime. It is smart to backup your site after any updates recently done. By doing so, you not only avoid website downtime that lasts for long periods, but you also make sure that none of the time and effort you invest in it goes to waste.
Image taken from Strikingly Product
- Acquire and Track. Acquiring the right information leads to you having the knowledge to anticipate problems. While experiencing website downtime commonly or frequently is not the best circumstance for you, the information you can gather within that time frame (whether it takes less than five minutes or so much more) can be a helpful tool in avoiding them in the future. By manually gathering website downtime information or using automated systems, you equip yourself with the information to anticipate them and quickly fix the problem before it occurs. When you track website downtime, you can identify the most common reasons why it happens and easily come up with a solution.
- Implement Good Monitoring. Monitoring your website does not only mean monitoring how your website is performing. It also means checking if your website is performing at all. This means monitoring your website now also means tracking website downtime and performance. And many different businesses and organizations offer such services today. These businesses constantly monitor and check if your website is working, notify you if there is any problem, analyze the root cause of the problem, and so many more. Thus employing a good monitoring system for your website, though it can be costly, is a must for you to avoid website downtime and always be efficient.
Troubleshooting Website Downtime With Strikingly
When you create a website with Strikingly - whether for business or personal purposes, troubleshooting your website downtime is quite easy. But the first thing you must do is to know and identify the cause of the website downtime you are experiencing because there can be two reasons for website downtime: your account was taken down, or your domain has expired. And don’t worry, you can easily track website downtime, verify which of these is causing it and fix it.
If the cause of your website downtime is your account status, you will see a “Website under construction” whenever you try to open your website. To check your account status, you must go to your account page and check the date your current plan begins.
Image taken from Strikingly Product
After verifying the beginning date of your current account plan, you have to go to your invoice page. You will see the last time you were issued an invoice and paid it. If you find that you are not yet paid for the current year, that would explain why you are experiencing some website downtime. And thus, all you have to do to fix it and avoid website downtime in the future is to pay your fees on time.
Image taken from Strikingly Product
Another one of the reasons for website downtime you might be experiencing with your Strikingly site is your domain status. To check this, you would have to sign in to your domain registrar and check if your domain has not yet expired or if it has been properly configured. Note that if you just connected a domain to your Strikingly site, it might take up to 48 hours to properly configure. So it is perfectly normal to experience website downtime during these moments. This means that there is no way to prevent website downtime with a newly-connected domain. However, if your domain has expired, you must pay for its renewal. You can prevent website downtime caused by domain expiration in the future by setting it to auto-renew.
Strikingly not only assists you in problems like website downtime, but it is also one of the best website builders today. And if you want to create one amazing website that can help elevate your business or your career while not leaving you hanging and worrying about how to track website downtime and avoid it, sign up with Strikingly today!
