For this reason you may reap the losses from your website instead of profit

Whether you have a website that you depend on its advertisements revenue, selling products through your own online shopping website or even a simple personal blog, we all can agree that your website is your gate to earn money on the internet which you seek to increase and achieve your business goals, now imagine that gate is closed, can you make money through your website while it’s down? or selling more products on your online store? or even achieve the fame which you worked so hard to achieve from your personal blog? of course not.

And that what we are going to talk about today, what are the negative impacts on your website due to frequent downtime and clarifying the risks which you didn’t think about it before.

What happens when your website goes down frequently?

There is a high fee you pay without knowing that, here is what is going to happen when your website goes down:

1. Your website’s rank will be decreased in Alexa due to daily visits drop.

2. You’ll lose visitors and potential customers who trying to reach your website during the downtime.

3. Your website’s search rank will be decreased especially on Google search.

4. You’ll lose profits that comes from sales and advertisements on your website.

5. You’ll lose your marketing campaigns’ budget if you are running a campaign to drive visitors to your website.

6. You’ll get negative reputation and credibility on your brand when visitors find your website unreachable.

7. You’ll lose  important data like visitors’ posts, comments and customers’ E-mails.

8. Wasting employees’ wages if their work depend on your website.

9. You’ll lose the trust of the current investors or the potential ones in your project.

10. You’ll waste a lot of your time and efforts while trying to compensate the previous negative impacts.

Can a website’s downtime affect its ranking?

Alright, Matt Cutts – former head of Google’s web spam team – answered that question and confirmed that if the website goes down for more than 15 minutes will affect somehow on your search rank because Google ranks websites based on what crawlers find while they crawl the website so if they didn’t find anything, it won’t be in your favor.

Here is the video which contains Matt’s answer to the question in details:

To summarize the answer from Matt Cutts, What google does towards your website’s rank depends on how long your website is down, He explains it by asking viewers to look at it from Google’s point of view which is  you don’t want to keep dead sites in the search results, but at the same time you don’t  want to drop if from the search results permanently right after a few second of downtime and there is no way for the website crawl to know when a website will be back up so it will try to re-crawl your website again throughout the day, While this is happening your website in most cases will temporarily drop in the Google search result rankings and but it will be dropped completely if the website still down for more than few days.

Then Matt Cutts continues, it may seem like one day of downtime is no big deal from your point of view but the website search result ranking will drop after six hours of down time on average 30% and stay that way until the next Google’s update which can take 30-60 days.

If your website drops from Google’s index, you will have to start your SEO steps all over again. The lesson from this video for webmasters is that website uptime is important and that several days of downtime can cause permanent loss rank in Google’s index.

How could you monitor your website’s availability and detect downtime?

The right way to handle the downtime problem is knowing how much your website goes down, Surely web hosting provider can confirm that your website’s uptime is 100% according to their server but this is not always the case because your website may be down while the server is running perfectly.

So you will need to monitor your website’s availability through one of the websites which offer monitoring tools and notifying you when your website is not reachable or down so you can know more about your website’s performance and the most important thing is to know if you have many downtimes or not, We recommend Uptime Robot Service which is free and provides many features and preferences which can be used in the monitoring process.

So, what if your website is suffering from frequent downtime? Then you should take crucial decisions about this problem to solve it permanently. It may requires changing the website’s script/system if it’s bad enough to cause this downtime, Your web hosting provider also can help you to find the suitable solution or service after analysing your website to handle the downtime issues and avoid them in the future, sometimes you may just need to move your website to another professional web hosting provider if the current one was the cause of this downtime.

But you will need to keep monitoring your website all the time just in case the same problem occurs in the future.

Stay close from your blog and don’t forget to share this post with your friends if you find it useful. 🙂