Surviving Downtime: What to Do Before and During Your Website Outage

Regardless if it’s only for a few minutes or an hour, website downtime can infuriate both the website owner and site visitors. Downtime can do more than just mere outage. It can undermine user loyalty, confidence, and trust. Moreover, if it happens too frequently, outages can eat into your business bottom line.

The question now is how can you dodge this scenario? If the website outage status checker reports your site is down for hours or days, how can you catch up?

What can you do before your website crashes?

There are a couple of things you can do before your website goes offline, and these include the following:

• Have a backup DNS service. Most of the problems related to the downtime are directly linked to DNS issues. If you subscribe to a backup DNS service, this can continuously collect your website’s DNS data and serve as a backup if the primary DNS goes down.
• Invest in a monitoring service. The great thing about this service is it constantly pings your site, and if ever it goes offline, you will get notified by an email or a text message.
• Be proactive in backing-up your database. Aside from regular website backups, also create an extra backup before you tweak the central database.
• ●       Renew your domain registration before it expires. Many downtime problems have been solved by domain name renewal. Set the service into auto-renew or purchase the domain name for 10 to 15 years, and lock the domain registrar.
• Utilize Google Webmaster Tools. This can provide you with comprehensive reports on your website’s visibility on the Google search engine. It can also notify you of Google crawling-related errors.
• Use proper downtime server error codes. Consult your IT team if you are unsure how to use these server codes. For example, it is better to notify crawlers that your website outage is temporary by taking a 503 Service Unavailable code instead of a 404 Not Found code.

What can you do during a website crash?

If your site visitors reported to the website outage status checker that your website is down, here are things you can do:

• Double-check and confirm whether your site is down. You can use an outage checker like Is It Down to do this. Make sure that your Internet connection or your browser is not the cause of the problem.
• Check what caused the downtime. Was it a hardware error? Expired domain name? DNS issue? Or was it caused by a programming error? Knowing the cause of the problem can help you get to the root of the problem.
• Get in touch with your IT team or your web hosting service provider. See if they help you solve the outage.
• Inform your users and site visitors of the downtime. Never leave your customers confused in the dark. You can post a message through your social media accounts to inform your users of the estimated turnaround time.

Also, keep them updated so they will know what to expect. If the downtime is planned, you can send a mass email ahead of time informing your users of the date, reason, and duration of the said outage.

• Check with the IT team regularly. Share the necessary information they would need to solve the problem and also ask them for an estimate on the duration of the outage.

Since not all downtimes can be spotted immediately, a website outage status checker can inform you whether or not your website is experiencing an outage. You can also gather information if users report your website offline.