A play on the “Is your refrigerator running?” crank call, many business owners and selling professionals don't know if their own websites is running. When your website crashes it can cost you hundreds of thousands in sales and a lifetime of credibility.
You say, “Not my website, it would never crash!” Others have accepted their website being down as something that will happen. Properly designed, your business website can be available for every visitor all the time.
Doesn't anyone visit the American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan? Because I'm setting up some contacts for an August speaking presentation in Taipei, I followed a link from the U.S. Commercial Services website, only to find it broken.
Imagine a sales person come into the office, lays back in their chair, openly taking a “power nap” for five hours. That is certainly unacceptable, yet many business websites do this every day.
Why do websites fail?
- Improper testing of new updates, changes, or site modifications;
- Changes at your web hosting provider or in their Internet connections;
- Shared hosting issues outside of your control, or a bad neighbor;
- Problems in network connectivity between your customer and your site;
- Website overloaded after marketing campaign, media pickup, or ranking;
- Improperly managed website, log files, or systems optimization;
- Search engine optimization gone wrong or improper redirects;
- Browser incompatibility that blocks a segment of your visitors;
- Landing pages that don't exist or marketing campaigns that lead nowhere;
Unfortunately, the list of things that can go wrong with a business website would fill volumes. To avoid website outages, increase availability to potential buyers, and lower service costs; only three things matter:
- Full service monitoring. How are you proactive about common problems you may have with a business website? Checking page loads, scripts, access from various geographic locations, and more indicators of up time can be automated.
- Disaster recovery planning. Are you prepared for a business website outage? By planning in advance you are more likely to identify problem before they happen.
- Redundant hosting coverage. Have you designed an environment resistant to common site failures? Build into your hosting, through the provider or implementation, a means of fast recovery.
Know when and if your site fail, then have a clear plan to address the situation. Use hosting redundancy or distribution to minimize points of failure. Because solutions are available at all price ranges, it's just a matter of deciding when you want to get started.
Here you'll find all the resources you need to get started protecting your profitable business website. If you have any question, comments, or concerns, just write me at my office. Because every website fails it's a matter of time before you face these problems, unless you do a little something now to protect your business website.
© 2008 B2B Website Profits, All rights reserved.
Justin Hitt and Hitt Publishing Direct provides simple solutions to prevent common problems that block your on-line earnings. Do you want better reliability for your high traffic website? Contact https://www.jwhco.com/