Negative Impact of Website Downtime

Posted on November 29, 2017

There are millions of reasons why sites go down. It could be an equipment malfunction or server overload. You might also experience data center problems, or you were just careless enough to forget to renew your domain name. Even worse, your site could be a hacker victim. Regardless of the cause, you need to resolve the problem as soon as it starts, because downtime can hurt your business.

Here are some important reasons why downtime hurts your business:

You will lose money

Every second of uptime is vital for your website, as your visitors might be unable to make a purchase if your site is unavailable. Even a small amount of downtime can have a significant impact. For example, Amazon lost an insane amount of $66,240 per minute while it was temporarily down. Of course, not everyone is Amazon, but even small websites can have significant losses.

User experience (UX) will suffer

All of your efforts to create a great site and provide an excellent user experience will go to nothing if your website is unavailable. A slow loading website will also provide a frustrating user experience. People are busy and impatient - they do not want to waste their time looking at a blank screen.

Your Google search rank will suffer

Google and other search engines do not want to send their visitors to websites that have a history of downtime because it means a poor user experience. That is why search engines will downgrade your site to be displayed in lower positions if they notice you had a significant outage.

Your brand credibility will be at risk

People might associate your brand with poor and annoying performance if your website is unavailable or too slow.

A recent survey sponsored by Riverbed Technology found staggering results:

  • 67% of visitors said they would stop using a site if it was loading slow on their smartphone.
  • 29% people using a mobile device would buy from a brick-and-mortar store after experiencing website issues, such as slow speed and reliability.
  • 22% would buy from a competitor's website after experiencing website issues, and 20% would abandon the purchase altogether.

Downtime can be extremely expensive, so you should avoid it at all costs. Uptimia is offering a website monitoring service. We monitor websites as often as 30 seconds and immediately alert if there are any problems or if it goes down. That way you can take instant action and quickly resolve all issues.