4 Tips to Maximize Your Website Uptime
By now you know that website downtime is detrimental to your business and its profits. While downtime isn’t completely avoidable, this doesn’t mean that you should take outages of your website laying down. If you’re serious about the success of your site and maximizing your website’s profits, you need to make sure you take proper action to minimize anything that poses a threat to those profits and take advantage of services that can help maximize uptime. Here are four tips to help you maximize your website uptime and protect your profits from dreaded website outages.
1. Keep It Simple
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when it comes to maximizing the uptime of your website is making the front end too complicated. A complex front end creates more room for things to go wrong, increasing the chance that your website will go down.
It is important to realize that every single website asset, whether it be JavaScript, a CSS file or an image, is a single point of failure. The more points of failure that a site has, the higher the chances are that something is going to go wrong. While a small failure, such as a small image failing to load, may not bring your entire site down, it does affect the user experience. Larger issues, on the other hand, can wreak havoc on your site and cause a massive bout of downtime.
The best way to avoid such scenarios is to limit the amount of assets on the site to begin with. Fewer CSS files, less JavaScript, and minimized complexity is the best way to reduce performance issues and to maximize website uptime in general. When creating or reviewing your site, look at every single asset and as yourself questions such as, "Is this widget really necessary?" If not, get rid of it to reduce the risk of having it cause complications down the road.
2. Utilize a Quality Hosting Provider
A good percentage of downtime issues are actually caused by hosting providers and are completely out of your control. Due to this fact, you need to make sure that your hosting provider is offering you quality hosting service.
First and foremost, ignore the uptime guarantee. It’s just a number used as an advertising gimmick and doesn’t really offer you (or your profits) much protection, if any. Instead, look for hosting providers that actually live up to their claims and have a reputation for consistent uptime and availability.
The best way to keep tabs on your hosting provider is via a third-party website monitoring service. Your website monitoring service will allow you to see exactly when (and how often) your website is going down. If your hosting provider keeps having issues that cause your site to endure outages, it’s time to look into a new hosting company. While 100 percent uptime is impossible, don’t be afraid to demand and expect uptime of 99.9 percent.
3. Utilize a CDN
A CDN (content delivery network) is a way of taking a website’s static files, such as CSS files, JavaScript, and images, and delivering the files through web servers that are closer to the end-user’s physical location. The shorter proximity allows for better performance and faster load times. This type of service also allows you to offload the bandwidth of your website and reduces your risk of website downtime and service disruptions due to heavy traffic volumes.
4. Create Redundancy
Usually the word "redundant" has negative connotations associated with it. However, when it comes to website uptime, redundancy is your friend. Invest in a DDoS mitigation platform. This service allows you to optimize and scale up the infrastructure of your site if you happen to become the victim of a DDoS attack. If an attack occurs, the traffic is redirected to the mitigation platforms and your site remains up and running instead of crashing under the pressure.
Another area in which redundancy can help you is with your DNS service. Check with your hosting provider to see what type of DNS services you are receiving. What happens if your DNS goes down? Will your site go down with it? If the answer is yes, upgrade to a service that will ensure automatic failover to other servers on the network. This ensures that if your DNS does go down, your site won’t go down with it.
In fact, a backup of your entire site hosted on a completely different server with a different hosting provider is also a good idea in terms of redundancy. If your hosting provider has a long-term outage and your site is going down with it, you can redirect your traffic to your back-up website so you aren’t losing traffic or sales.
Maximizing Uptime Means Maximizing Profits
While downtime isn’t completely avoidable and all sites run into at least some downtime every now and then, there are steps that you can take to ensure that any downtime your website experiences is kept to an absolute minimum. The above four tips are a great step in the right direction toward maximizing your website’s uptime and protecting your website’s profits from downtime that could have been avoided with a bit of planning.