How Website Downtime Affects Online Businesses

One of the biggest embarrassments you could face with an online business is when your website goes down and you hear about it from someone else. Consumers expect that everything around them will be connected online and continuously available. To succeed in this age, you have to maintain a strong online presence. Now, web is the place where you can expect to engage with a majority of your customers and generate substantial part of revenue. However, if your website fails to run smoothly, your online business could be affected in multiple ways. Let’s see a few ways how website downtime can affect you:

Website Downtime Causes Lost Profits

Every second of website downtime could have a negative impact for busy websites. Even the biggest online businesses are not immune to downtime. Recently, Amazon.com went down for 20 minutes and it is estimated that it costs them about $3.75 million in profits. Though the damage may not be to the same dollar value for your business, these lost profits may affect your online business in a substantially negative manner.

Dissatisfied Customers

As the owner of a business you will not want to lose even a single customer. However, if your website goes down it may negatively impact retention of your existing customers who may be interacting with your website during the downtime. An unfavorable first impression caused by your website downtime does not help acquiring new customers. Customers do not have much patience with sites that experience downtime. There may be several alternatives available online, which are easily found using search engines just by entering a relevant keyword. Impatient customers will not think twice before switching to another service.

Damaged Brand Reputation

A good brand reputation offers immense benefits to your business. It takes years for an organization to build a strong brand reputation. But, when your site is down the years of investment in building a good reputation start to unravel. If the website downtime is extended, current and potential customers may even voice their frustration in various social media platforms. In the current environment, for your website to develop a good brand reputation it must have excellent track record of uptime and also deliver fast site performance.

Negative First Impression

It is almost certain if new customers visit your site and find out it is down, they may never visit your site again. You may not only lose the immediate sale, there is also the lost repeat sale when the customer comes back to your site. In order to make a good first impression, make sure your website is available and also ensure it loads fast.

Lost Sales Volume

According to a research by App Dynamics conducted among Fortune 1000 companies, total cost of unplanned application downtime is between $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion. Sadly, many organizations do not even know the impact of one day of website downtime on their business.

Here is a simple formula that will help you to find out the loss in sales volume if your website goes down for a day: (yearly revenue/365) x online sales as percentage of overall sales.

And if you are running an e-commerce site, the impact of website downtime on your sales will be close to 100%. Clearly, website downtime is not something that you should be casual about.

Website Monitoring Service - a Key Tool to Control Downtime

For all the reasons above, it is important to maintain a stellar website uptime record for your site. Site downtime can affect your company or brand in a lot of different ways. Revenue loss is the most obvious one. The first impression of customers about your company will also be bad. Your effort to build up customer loyalty will also face a setback. And your brand reputation will suffer damage.

Avoiding website downtime will keep your customers happy. But without proper web monitoring mechanism it will be difficult for you to get the benefits of website having good uptime. Business owners, big or small, should consider purchasing a website monitoring service. The web monitoring service will help you stay on the top of your website’s uptime. It will ensure that your website is up and running round the clock.