The Importance of Maintaining Website Uptime During Holiday Season

For a business that depends on its website to generate revenues, maintaining uptime during holiday season is critical. This is the most profitable time for ecommerce businesses as they will be generating higher revenues through online sales. It is important for these websites to make sure customers can get access to their offerings without any disruption, particularly between Thanksgiving and Christmas days when more sales are expected to happen. Business owners aspire to keep their websites live without any unplanned downtime in this period. They keep a check on their hosting plans and make websites ready to tackle heavy incoming traffic.

Despite these efforts, sometimes things can go wrong for various reasons, making website inaccessible to the users in a matter of seconds. It is the worst nightmare that site owners could anticipate because the impact of losses would be much more when compared to normal days. Though they keep some backup plans in place, sometimes none of these things work out and make the site vulnerable for downtime and performance issues.

What the Customers May Think of You as Business?

In general, many big name retail brands start preparing their websites for holiday season months in advance. Many websites typically suffer with severe performance degradation issues when the site starts experiencing huge volume of online shoppers. Not all websites suffer with outage issues during this time of the year. Some of them with good market reputation suffer performance degradation and disruptions because of traffic spikes. When the site is sluggish with poor performance, the customers certainly become irritated and some get frustrated enough to move on to competitor sites. The losses measured will be substantial both in terms of lost customers and revenues. It is not only an immediate loss caused by losing prospective customers, but also a loss in terms of future business and not to mention brand image. Customers may develop a negative impression if there is a persistent downtime for long durations and they may not like to visit the website again in future.

Scalability of Hosting Resources

When we talk about downtime, it is not just the unavailability of website services but also includes operational and performance issues. There is no need to have a complete website down to make the customers unhappy. Even a second delay in page load speed or a portion of the website not working can lead to costumers’ frustration with your website. It is important to assess hosting services for bandwidth & server capability and see if it can accommodate increased customer traffic during estimated peak volume. Website hosting should be scalable, otherwise site could experience frequent downtime during the busiest season of the year. For instance, sometimes even an upgraded hosting plan might not be helpful if the spikes are acute or manifold traffic for a few hours on peak days. Having secondary hosting service may resolve downtime and performance issues but this approach will only be effective if the alternative service is a high volume hosting.

Opt for Effective Solutions That Prevent Common Website Downtime Issues

Website downtime is not rocket science, there are many common issues that repetitively cause downtime. When your business is expected to have significant web traffic spikes during holiday season, you would want to go to a provider who has built a methodology or system to prevent downtime from commonly encountered situations. Then there are certain providers and some solutions that they provide that address the challenges to more complex issues by tailoring systems and resources to address the challenges of high volume sites. A high volume site should opt for such solutions. One way of knowing what issues are being seen frequently is to use a good website monitoring service. Also, comprehensive website monitoring services are useful way to identify and address the risks before they ever become a problem. The uptime monitor will let you know how the site is working against user demands and makes it easy to track various elements associated with website performance. This information will help you choose the right solutions for your hosting needs.