Here are 10 ways to prevent website downtime

Every minute of website downtime cost large organizations an average of $9,000. That’s half a million dollars every hour, damn. And that’s just the average. If your organization heavily relies on your website to do business, that cost can increase even further. Needless to say, preventing website downtime is a top priority.

Leading causes of website downtime

Before we jump into ways of preventing website downtime, let’s first cover the leading causes of website downtime. If you can diagnose the cause of the downtime, you’ll be in a much better spot to prevent it from happening again. You don't want the perpetual Whac-a-Mole. So, here are the eight leading causes of website downtime:

• Server issues: Whether you run your own website servers or pay for third-party hosting, hardware or software issues with your website’s servers can cause your site to go down.
• Overwhelmed resources: A sudden spike in traffic to your website can cause your servers to become overwhelmed preventing additional traffic from accessing your site.
• Expired SSL certificates: Although this doesn’t cause your website to go down, an expired SSL certificate should be treated the same. Most users will navigate away from your site if they receive a warning saying your site is insecure which occurs with an expired SSL certificate.
• DNS configuration issues: Your DNS needs to be configured correctly so that users are directed to your site when they navigate to your site’s URL. A DNS issue prevents people from accessing your site through your domain name.
• Software conflicts: Most sites use software to handle the backend of their website. Any errors with the software, which can occur after an update or due to conflicts between multiple software running different parts of a site’s backend, can cause your site to go down.
• Cyberattacks: Malicious actors can bring your website down with cyberattacks such as DDoS attacks which artificially overwhelm your hosting infrastructure.
• Human error: Mistakes happen more often than we think. Thankfully, if it was human error that took down your website, it usually means you can get it back up by reverting the action that caused the downtime.
• Maintenance gone awry: During scheduled maintenance, things can go wrong that cause the downtime to extend beyond the planned maintenance time.

10 ways to help you to prevent website downtime

So, how do you prevent those eight leading causes of website downtime from occurring? We’re going to cover the 10 most effective strategies to prevent website downtime and minimize its impact.

Implement global uptime monitoring

To prevent website downtime, you first need to know when it happens. That can help you identify issues causing your website to go down. It also allows you to take immediate action to bring your site back up when it goes down.

Monitor your SSL certificates

Like we mentioned, issues with your SSL certificate won’t cause website downtime, but it does divert traffic. When issues with your SSL certificate exist, anyone navigating to your website will be greeted with a big warning from their browser saying your site is not secure. Most people do not choose to proceed to your site after that warning. SSL certificate monitoring ensures you’re the first person to know about any issues with your certificate so you can fix it before they impact your users.

Set up performance Monitoring

Pages that load slowly can have just as big of an impact as a page being down. When a page takes over three seconds to load, nearly half of users will leave your site. Performance monitoring keeps an eye on how long it takes your site to load and tells you what’s bogging down your load times. That gives you the information you need to make your site faster.

Implement DNS monitoring

Internal tests can easily miss DNS errors. Afterall, an issue with your DNS won’t prevent your server from sending data to a test environment. But, it does prevent your users from accessing your website. You need your DNS configured correctly to ensure your users can access your site through your domain name. DNS monitoring checks your configuration, ensures users can access your domain, and tells you where the error exists if there is an issue with your DNS records.

Schedule regular backups

Downtime is not 100% avoidable. There will be errors that happen whether they’re human errors, an issue with your hosting servers, or a software issue. Scheduling regular backups allows you to rollback your changes at any time while minimizing progress loss. This can immediately bring your website back up if you run into software issues or a human error that takes down your site.

Implement load balancing

Without load balancing, a single server becoming overwhelmed can prevent some users from accessing your website. Load balancing spreads out the traffic to your website between multiple servers preventing any one server from becoming overwhelmed. This makes your website more scalable as you can add more servers to accommodate increases in traffic.

Monitor scheduled tasks

Whether its database or server maintenance, keep track of scheduled tasks and monitor their progress. These tasks can fail and if not monitored, can cause cascading effects that create downtime for your website.

Check for mixed content

Mixed content doesn't cause downtime, but it does create a poor user experience. Browsers can identify mixed content and then send users a security warning just like with SSL certificate issues. Monitoring for this type of content tells you what pages it affects so that you can fix it.

Set Up application health monitoring

Most modern websites use various applications to run all the aspects of their site. These applications need to work in tandem for every part of your site to work. Application health monitoring notifies you of issues within an application and with the integration of each application so that it can work cohesively.

Create and maintain a status page

When downtime occurs, communication is critical. You want your users to know that your website will be coming back up and, if you can, give them a timeframe of when they can expect your site to be back up. So, create and maintain a status page with all relevant information you can display during downtime.

Monitoring your website

It can sound overwhelming to manage all this stuff just to prevent downtime and fix issues before they impact your users. But guess what, modern website monitoring solutions—like Oh Dear of course—can manage all of the above with minimal effort from your end. They offer you a single dashboard to track all relevant aspects of your website from your performance and uptime to your SSL certificate and DNS records. You can try OhDear for free for 30 days to see how website monitoring can help you better manage your sites.

FAQs about website downtime

How can I quickly respond to website downtime? Website monitoring is the best way to get notified of website downtime immediately so that you can respond to it as quickly as possible.

Should I notify users about downtime? Yes, proactive communication is the best way to minimize the impacts of downtime to your end user. Be open about the cause of the downtime, how long you expect it to impact users, and the extent of the impact.

How do I diagnose the cause of website downtime? You can start your diagnosis with the monitoring tool that notified you of the downtime. It should tell you the general cause of the error based on the HTTP status code the monitoring service received to identify the downtime. From there, you need to systematically test ever aspect related to the general cause until you find the point of failure.

What should I include in my website downtime status page? When displaying a status page notifying users that your website is currently down, we recommend including information related to when they can expect your website to come back up as well as a sign-up form that allows users to receive a notification when your website is back up.