Keeping Track Of Your Website's Uptime

Most businesses nowadays have online presence and recent statistics show that online sales have grown exponentially in the past years rivaling their retail sales.   The online store however is managed, maintained and monitored quite differently from the physical store, forcing old school entrepreneurs to educate themselves further.  This article tackles of the issues of concern which is website uptime and what it means for an online business.

Uptime or website availability must be monitored 24/7 so that you are aware if there are any problems or glitches on your site as soon as it happens. You can then address the problem before any of your visitors see them.  Remember that websites are aimed to please visitors and prospective clients – there is nothing pleasing about a page that is not loading properly or fats enough or worse, if the website can’t be found!

Keeping track of your website’s uptime assures you that your website is getting the most amounts of viewers it can possibly get.  Uptime is measured in percentages and if the web hosting service has offered   you 99.9% uptime that means your site is up 99.9% of the time. 

So what does that translate to?  If your website is a revenue generating site (which means you appreciate explanations in dollar percentages rather than time) and your site that earns $100 a day, 99% equates to a loss of 10 cents a day, $3 a month and $36.50 a year.  And of course, the higher the earning the higher the loss. 

There are web hosting companies that refund the loss if your site’s uptime falls below the guarantee, but they only do that if you have proof.  The dilemma is that you can’t possibly be on uptime monitoring duty all the time.  But there is no need to look bleak, there are website monitoring services available out there and the service extends to monitoring site speeds and hacker alerts and over-all website performance. 

Sure, there are free services but the only monitor web uptime every 30 minutes that is not frequent enough. If you are guaranteed at 99% uptime that is a downtime of about 15 minutes a day.  You can’t possibly know if you had a downtime of more than 15 minutes if the site-monitor checks every 30 minutes! Furthermore, being alerted that your site is down 30 minutes later could mean a loss of a substantial number of visitors.

Web Maintenance - A TO DO List For the Designated Web Master

Web maintenance is an ongoing activity that is necessary in website management.  These are tasks that ensure the website does its job of keeping you visible online (ranking high on SERPs) and that all plugins, forms and images appear and function properly. The following is an enumeration of what tasks are involved with web maintenance.  Remember that the list is very fundamental, and is just a portion of what web maintenance service providers do.

1.       Monitor the website daily. This is time consuming but necessary. Check your website for broken links, plugins, widgets, completed forms and potential hacking.

2.       Update blogs and edit them when you can.  Write at least an article per week to keep it interesting. Monitor, reply, approve and delete comments, the activity from the comments help site visibility and generate traffic. This better done daily and best not to go a whole week without updating.

3.       Review how your site is doing statistically.  You may use tools like Google Analytics to help you make improvements on your site. Do this every three months or per season, especially if your products and service is seasonal.

4.       Review your local search visibility in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.  If you are a local business, it is much more important to rank higher in local searches.

5.       Check the browser compatibility of your website.  Browsers are constantly revamped and updated ones in a while and every now and then new ones are launched, so you have to keep up with the changes for the sake of your viewers and potential clients.

6.       Review your site for consistency, especially regarding content. Pages that advertise promotions and discounts and those that have date references need to be checked.

7.       Check your copyright and licenses as well as domain name registrations need to be checked yearly and at a timely manner. 

8.       Email accounts linked to the website must also be monitored, inactive ones need to be deleted and the website updated along with the changes.

Some of these tasks such as daily monitoring and blogging take most of the time of the designated web master. Some are better outsourced but that does not mean you are brought out of the loop.  Allocating the job to web maintenance services just means your job gets simpler so you can focus on what you do best.