Top 5 Ways That Website Downtime Affects Your Company

With so many websites on the internet and new brands forming as part of them left, right and center, website downtime is inevitably going to happen at some point on your website.

The nature of networks and networking means that your website could go down simply because of human error, or, it might be scheduled downtime for your website in which case it shouldn't be as impactful.

Unfortunately though, even if you've scheduled website downtime for your site, it'll still be felt by your customers and people attempting to access your site.

So in this article, I thought it would be useful to tell you the ways in which downtime will affect your company.

If you'd like to know more, then read on...

Top 5 Ways That Website Downtime Affects Your Company

1. Lost Productivity - lower productivity rates and being unable to communicate
2. Brand & Reputation Damage - you'll lose reputation and trust in your customers
3. Cyber Security Threats - you could be attacked by a cyber threat
4. Lost Customer Data - you could end up losing customer data with website downtime
5. Lost Opportunities - you might never get the chance again

You'll See A Loss In Productivity

One of the most impactful ways that website or system downtime will affect your company is by reducing the productivity of your team, especially when you're working remotely.

All businesses nowadays depend on communications when online, and this can range from simple emails to virtual chat, and using tools such as Slack.

If any one of these communication channels goes down and stops working, you won't be able to communicate effectively and this will result in lost productivity, which isn't great.

Examples Of Lost Productivity

• Manufacturing - if in this industry there's an unscheduled outage on your server, it could completely seize operations since this industry relies heavily on the technology to keep track of inventory and production output, these industries use sensors and special technology that relies on servers being functional
• Education - in the education sector, schools, colleges and universities all rely on a robust network infrastructure to allow students to collaborate with one another and submit course work, if a system experiences downtime, students won't be able to complete these submissions which could affect their education
• Transport - if you've ever been to a train station, you'll see the overhead signs indicating whether a train is on time or delayed, when the transport sector experiences system downtime and website downtime combined, members of the public can't identify whether their train is delayed or on time, resulting in lost productivity

As you can see, downtime affects many different industries and sectors in different ways, and they all point back to lower productivity rates for your company!

Brand And Reputation Damage

In November 2020, Amazon experienced a widespread outage with their systems which affects thousands and third-party companies for hours on end, and chances are, some customer left Amazon for good.

When your website stops working, and your customers try to access your website and realise that it's not working, they're going to be (understandably) very frustrated.

Some customers won't return, and they'll leave your brand altogether which will result in brand damage.

Can you imagine the impact that this will cause?

As your company and website grows, you're going to find that magazine and media websites start to publish articles about your website going down, which will lead to potential reputation lost that's taken years to grow.

Cyber Security Threats

Did you know that in 2019 there were over 350,000 new pieces of malware discovered? Malware is incredibly dangerous to websites and the servers that websites and systems run on.

When your website or system stops working and experiences downtime, you're likely going to be running around trying to figure out how to get it back up, you'll be focussed on getting it up again for your customers...

This can also be the chance for many different cyber security attacks to take place, hackers might attempt to access your server and steal data, whilst other attacks could've actually caused your website to go down in the first place.

How To Protect My Website From Downtime?

One of the best ways that you can protect your website from downtime, is by setting up a website monitor in our monitoring tool. It's completely free to set up and we'll alert you immediately when your website stops working.

You might be wondering how this is going to protect your website from going down?

Well, you'll be able to see a performance graph showing the response of your website to find out whether it's getting slower and slower, which might indicate that your site is under attack and could go down any minute.

You can sign up for an account and start adding websites to be monitored.

Loss Of Customer Data

Website and system downtime is more than just downtime for your company, sometimes, there's more serious reasons behind the outages that your website experiences...

Back in October 2013, Adobe, one of the biggest companies on the internet that contains over 153 million user records had over 3 million of them stolen, the data included:

• Credit card records
• Login data
• Other personal information

That's huge!

The effect on their business, systems and website as a result of that incident caused massive website downtime for them for a duration of time, lost productivity rates and guess what?

Adobe had to pay over $1.1 million in legal fees.

When your website goes down, there might be more sinister reasons behind it, and not just a simple outage that will recover soon after.

How To Protect Your Customers

There are some simple things that you can to do help protect your customers and reduce the chance of data being lost, and in the event of data being lost, you'll be minimising the impact

• SSL certificate - your website and systems should always have an SSL certificate installed and properly working
• Backups - always backup your website's data to a secure off site location
• Password Security - encourage your customers to change their password often, and enforce strong password requirements

Lost Opportunities

Every business wants to thrive and produce something amazing for the world right?

Whether it be that you're selling products and you want to make the best product ever for your potential customers, or maybe you're providing a service to people and want more people to get on board with it...

Whatever the case may be, you want more opportunities right?

Well, if your website goes down and experiences downtime, or your API stops working because you didn't use API monitoring, you're going to lose opportunities that you could've kept had you had the processes in place to ensure your website remained up.

Every missed opportunity is an opportunity that you could've closed that new sale on, and this is another reason why you need to monitor your website.