10 Preventative Tips to Ensure Your Websites Do Not Go Down

A website is an e-commerce shop for businesses and personal brands, allowing them to expose themselves to thousands of users and customers worldwide. But websites can go offline, much about the same way a physical store can be closed for repairs. In this article, we’ll explore website downtime, what it is, and what website owners can do to avoid it.

What Is Website Downtime?

Website downtime is when a site is unreachable to users. This is often due to excessive traffic, a problem with the server, or a DDoS attack. If not well managed, downtime can negatively affect search engine rankings and result in missed opportunities for sales or other actions.

Why is Preventing Website Downtime Important?

Website downtime is no mere minor technical glitch — it can inflict serious damage to your brand’s reputation and your bottom line. Imagine a customer trying to purchase something from your site and then seeing a “503 service unavailable” error. Most likely, they will go to a competitor and you will lose that sale.

I will discuss the impact of downtime on your business, including:

• Lost sales. The more extended your online store is down, the more missed sales you have!
• Damage to your reputation. Visitors who continue to see your site going down will gradually start losing faith in your brand. Having a functioning website shows that you care about the experience of your customers.
• Lower search rankings. In fact, Google considers your site’s uptime and loading speed when ranking it. Your site will be harder to find if it goes down often, as your ranking drops.
• Security risks. During site downtime, hackers can take advantage of your website and make it easier to attack.

These risks make it critical to keep your website up and running for your business’s long-term success.

10 Ways To Prevent Website Downtime From Happening

In this section, we will describe you the 10 easiest strategies to prevent the website from going down and ensure the availability of your site all the time.

1. Pick a Reliable Hosting Provider

A great web host is important, because it impacts the uptime and performance of your site. When there are so many host offers, you need to be cautious while picking one. These are several factors to keep in mind before purchasing hosting:

• Uptime guarantee: A good hosting provider guarantees that your website will be online all the time by using regular server maintenance and advanced technology to minimize downtime.
• Site speed: A slow site may annoy visitors. Select a host that uses speedy servers and is well-equipped with data centers all over the world so that your site can load instantly and function seamlessly.
• Security: A reliable host will have solid security measures to safeguard your site from all kinds of threats, including potential issues that could lead to downtime, data loss, and sometimes legal issues.
• 24/7 support: If something goes wrong, or when your site goes down, you want a hosting provider that will give you support around the clock, either by email or live chat.
• Scalability: When your business expands, you will need a host that can accommodate more traffic without slowdowns or downtimes.

Interserver guarantees a 99.9% uptime within a supported infrastructure, with modern technology and data centers around the world. We also offer advanced security with DDoS protection, malware scanning, and a web application firewall to keep your site secure. All plans come with free SSL certificates and automated backups. And if you have any issues, our support team is here 24/7 to assist.

2. Set Up Regular Backups

Website downtime can lead to data loss for you and your customers, risking sensitive data such as account information, contact information, and transaction history. If customers are making purchases or updating their profiles when your site crashes, they could potentially lose their partial changes that were not saved, resulting in lost sales and a poor experience for them.

This is why it’s important to set regular backups for WordPress and other sites. Here’s why:

• Data protection: Regular backups will keep your site’s data secure. If anything goes wrong — if you are attacked by malicious code, your server crashes, or you accidentally delete your content — you can easily restore your site to its former glory.
• Business continuity: In case of lost data, backups allow your online store to keep operating without interruption.
• Compliance requirements: There may be laws that require you to protect customer data, depending on your industry. Regular backups keep you compliant with those rules.

3. Use Monitoring Tools

Monitoring tools let website owners monitor their site’s performance and take action to help keep it online. Here are the top tools to keep track of your website’s uptime:

• UptimeRobot: This free tool pings your site every five minutes and alerts you if it crashes.
• Pingdom: Known for its speed tests, Pingdom also provides real-time website monitoring with immediate alerts.
• Site24x7: This tool provides detailed insights for your site’s performance and an array of ways to be alerted about issues.

4. Optimize Website Performance

A site with numerous users increases the processing demands on the server to serve requests, generate pages, and deliver content. This could overwhelm the server, causing your site to lag or even crash. Improving your site’s speed is important for a better customer experience. This can involve image compression, code minimization, and browser caching.

At Interserver, we are all too aware of how crucial it is to optimize a website in order to keep it from going offline. Our cloud hosting plans come with the improved LiteSpeed caching system for this reason. They are also equipped with solid-state drives (SSDs) for faster data access and a global content delivery network (CDN) to speed up loading times. These features work together to assist in keeping your site optimized and minimize the possibility of downtime. A speedy website is also good for SEO design, because page speed is one of the factors that Google uses to rank websites.

5. Implement Security Measures

There are many different types of malicious attacks that can have a damaging impact on your website’s uptime:

• DDoS attacks bombard your site with traffic until the server resources are exhausted and it crashes.
• Data breaches often involve phishing and social engineering tricks, which hurt user trust. In some cases, these attacks may even result in your web host temporarily taking your site down.
• Malware infections can disrupt critical functions on the website. Cleaning out the infected parts of your site often takes time, which can mean downtime.

This includes regularly checking for potential threats and using techniques that prevent downtime. If you do not have a tech background, you can always depend on a managed hosting provider that comes with automatic security measures like Interserver. Below are the ways we protect your site against various threats:

• Web Application Firewall — It filters out malicious requests, so you’ll only get trusted users on your site.
• Malware scanner: We automatically search and remove harmful code from your database.
• Free SSL certificate: We provide unlimited free SSL certificates to facilitate secure data transfer between your server and visitors’ browsers.
• DDoS protection: Our system enables us to block harmful bots and other malicious users, thus ensuring that your website stays up and runs smoothly.
• Login protection: Two-factor authentication is administered along the login process to the hosting account for the prevention of brute-force attacks and for enhanced security.

6. Handle Traffic Spikes Better

Traffic management is important to prevent downtime, which is even more severe when more users come to your site during peak times. Here are some proven tips to prepare your website for high traffic:

• Monitor your visitors: Tools such as Google Analytics help you track your site’s performance and traffic patterns. This will allow you to anticipate times when more customers may drop by. For instance, travel agencies are likely to experience increased traffic around the holidays.
• Optimize your database: Remove unnecessary files in your database and use indexing to quicken searches. This allows for more efficient storage and retrieval of data, resulting in faster load times.
• Optimize for your server: Ensure that your hosting plan has sufficient power for traffic peaks. This is particularly significant with shared hosting, where many sites share a server.
• Enable caching: Caching saves things like images and stylesheets on users’ devices so that the server doesn’t have to reload them each time, speeding up load times.

You can easily upgrade when needed with Interserver’s flexible hosting plans. If you’re not prepared to shell out for an upgrade, there’s also a temporary boost option. This allows you to temporarily raise your plan’s limits for 24 hours. Object caching is a nice feature as it is usually deployed in a containerized environment simply as a service, so this is great for WordPress users. It caches frequently used data temporarily, so that the next time a user requests it, the server can respond faster. This can enhance your site’s performance and reliability by 2-3 times.

7. Schedule Routine Maintenance

A well-maintained website is key to ensuring everything on your website runs well. Don’t wait until problems happen — staying on top of updates and monitoring can prevent downtime. Devise a maintenance plan and adhere to a recurring schedule to keep things functioning well. Weekly, monthly, or once every few months if your site is complex.

Below are a few easy steps that will help you keep your website running:

• Review the performance of your website: Identify issues that need to be addressed, such as slow load times or security concerns.
• Update your CMS (Content Management System): Keep your CMS updated to its latest version, including all plugins, themes, and other software.
• Check your site’s speed: Tools like PageSpeed Insights or Interserver’s Dotcom monitor tool can show you how quickly your site loads.
• Audit your site’s security: Find potential threats and patch the gaps to ensure that your site does not get hacked.
• Search for broken links or missing content: After modifications, check for any issues, such as broken links, missing images, or formatting problems.
• Log maintenance: Write down what you’ve done, when, and any changes made. This may assist in case you need to troubleshoot later.
• Build a downtime landing page: If maintenance requires that your site be taken offline temporarily, build a page to let visitors know when it will be back online.

Doing these steps regularly will keep your website healthy and help you avoid any issues down the line.

8. Balance the Traffic Load

You can implement load balancing which is an effective way to ensure that your website remains available. It is used to balance the load of web traffic across multiple servers so that no one single server is overloaded. To achieve this effectively, be sure to have a hosting provider with several servers in different locations.

Interserver provides this with data centers in Secaucus, New Jersey, and Los Angeles, California. Pair this with our built-in CDN and you’re looking at keeping your website up and running. If one data center goes down or receives too much traffic, our system will automatically redirect visitors to a backup server — keeping your site online.

9. Use Secure Themes and Plugins

Using themes and plugins, WordPress users can add new features and designs to their sites, making them more visually appealing and easier to navigate. But an older theme and plugins can compromise the safety and security of your site. Outdated versions have security vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to break into your site, steal data, or cause a site crash.

Here are some tips to help keep your site safe before you install a WordPress theme or plugin:

• Use only trusted sources for downloads: Ensure that when you are accessing themes or plugins, they are from the official WordPress directory or reputable marketplaces like ThemeForest. Free offerings from unknown sites can be risky.
• Read reviews and ratings: Check out what other users say about the particular theme or plugin. Reviews can give you a sense of its security and performance.
• Check the last update: Ensure that the theme or plugin has been recently updated in the last six months. If developers update their product regularly, they will fix security bugs as soon as possible.
• Try it out first: Install it on a staging site where you can test the theme or plugin for vulnerabilities and compatibility issues before using it on your live site.
• Uninstall what you don’t need: If you’re no longer using a theme or plugin, delete it. Unused themes and plugins are a security threat and can also slow your site down because they occupy resources on your server.

10. Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan

Despite all these efforts to prevent downtimes, unforeseen security breaches can happen. This is why you need a disaster recovery plan (DRP) to secure your website data. Here’s how to create one:

• Identify assets and risk: Enumerate critical assets (data, hardware, software, etc.). Then, think of potential threats, like server crashes, cyberattacks, natural disasters or human error.
• Establish recovery goals: Determine the speed at which you would like your systems to be recovered (recovery time objective, RTO) and how much data you can afford to lose in the case of a disaster (recovery point objective, RPO).
• Form a recovery team: Segregate workers into roles such as DRP leader, IT personnel, and communications leads. Train your team so everyone knows what to do in case of an emergency.
• Make plans to recover: Prioritize risks in order of severity, then outline the specific steps you can take to address each one.
• Back up your data: Use the automatic backups feature for important data and store the backups in a safe place so you don’t lose anything in a disaster.
• Train on the DRP: Ensure a regular training routine for both the IT and operations teams on the DRP. Identify weaknesses and revise the plan accordingly.
• Document it: Write all the details of your DRP, including contact details, procedures, recovery steps, etc. Put it in one place and make it readily available for your team when required.

What Causes Website Downtime?

There are many reasons websites can go down, from hardware problems to cyberattacks. Here are a few common reasons why:

Server Issues

If a server fails, all the websites hosted on it become inaccessible. There are two main reasons this could occur:

• Hardware issues: This might include broken hard drives, power supply problems, CPUs that are overheating, or vintage components.
• Software issues: These range from bugs in your software, a corrupted operating system, insufficient RAM, wrong settings, or issues with your connection to the database.

Software Update Problems

Keeping your software updated is crucial for your site’s safety and smooth performance. But issues can occur during the update process. Compatibility problems, improper settings or installation, software conflicts, and other scenarios may give rise to such situations.

Traffic Surges

A surge in website visitors may crash your server. If your hosting setup isn’t robust enough to handle these traffic spikes, your website may slow down or even crash.

Security Issues

Hackers can execute attacks on your site to break pages or steal important information. This is the primary reason behind using good security tools such as firewalls and two-factor authentication (2FA).

DDoS Attacks

In a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, hackers use numerous infected devices to send heavy traffic to your server. Their goal is to overload your site and cause it to stop working. This is why you want solid DDoS protection, the type Interserver offers, to protect your online presence.

Conclusion

Websites are an essential tool for businesses to reach customers and sell products online. However, server issues, sudden bursts of traffic, DDoS attacks, etc., can lead to downtimes that can impact your business. To maintain the efficiency of your website, here are some vital steps to ensure your site remains online:

• Choose a reliable web hosting provider to minimize downtime and ensure faster loading.
• Arrange regular backups to avoid data loss if your website goes down.
• Monitor your site and perform regular maintenance to ensure everything works well and is secure.
• Distribute traffic spikes across multiple servers so that the load is shared.
• Have a disaster recovery plan in case something goes wrong.

Keep in mind that downtime prevention is a continuous process. Ensure your visitors have a smooth and reliable experience, whether things are running smoothly or not.