On July 16, 2018 Amazon customers across the nation were looking forward to Amazon Prime Day specials. Other than Black Friday, there is no other day of the year that Amazon offers the kind of deals that Amazon offers to its Prime members during the annual Prime Day event. Last month we had discussed the caution Amazon should take to ensure there were no problems with overloaded servers or website downtime. Unfortunately, when Prime Day commenced, numerous customers saw Amazon’s dog pages (pages of pictures with actual employee dogs indicating there is a problem with the website).

Amazon’s famous Prime Day, which boasts deals that equal or surpass those found on Black Friday, is coming mid-month. Sources are saying deals will start July 16th and run through July 17th this year. In years past, customers have had frustration with slow-loading pages, while other pages did not load at all. Not only does this cause Amazon to lose sales on one of its biggest days of the year, but it causes serious frustration for customers in an “I want it now” mindset who feel that they are missing out on a limited-time deal.

Over the years we’ve discussed, in depth, why a website monitoring service is essential to the success of your business and why website downtime can be your business’s worst enemy. If you host your website on your own servers, you can take measures that others who use a hosting provider cannot. However, even those who use a web hosting service to host their websites should not be left feeling vulnerable and completely in the dark when things do go awry.

Recently (and in the past) we have discussed the importance of your website’s performance. From lost customers and pages that don’t convert well to a hit to your search engine rankings, performance really does matter. In the past we have discussed how to help with specific performance issues in general. Now we will look at the top seven issues that tend to affect website performance and could be causing your website’s performance to take a dive.

The speed at which desktop sites load has long been a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm, but recently Google announced that the page load time of mobile sites are now also going to be factored in when ranking sites in its search engine pages. We have previously mentioned that website performance, especially slowly loading pages, can have a detrimental effect on your online business. Now, not only are your desktop site’s page load speeds going to affect your Google rankings, but your mobile page load speeds may affect your rankings as well.

We all know that IT and website downtime cost companies money, but it doesn’t really hit you just how hard these numbers affect your business’s bottom line to until you see them spread out before you. While every business is different, the average cost of downtime for a large online business is in the millions. Here we break down just how much downtime can be costing your business, and what you can do to minimize that number.

We often discuss website downtime, why it’s detrimental to your business, what you can do to prevent it, and how to overcome it quickly when it does happen. However, website downtime isn’t the only issue that can have a negative impact on your online business. Website performance issues can hit you just as hard if you aren’t careful. Here we will discuss why website performance is just as important as website uptime, how to improve your site’s speeds, and how website monitoring can help you keep an eye on the performance of your site.

As we head into 2018 most businesses would like to achieve the ultimate goal of attaining zero percent website downtime in the coming year. The question remains, is zero percent downtime yet possible? While the bad news is that while you cannot yet control the inevitable, the good news is that you can take extra measures to ensure that your visitors have a way to accomplish what they wish to do when they visit your site and that your business can go on to the greatest extent possible at all times, no matter what is going on behind the scenes.

Now that the holiday season is here, it is even more crucial for many online businesses to avoid downtime and capture as much of the incoming seasonal traffic as possible. If you were to go to your favorite store during the holidays, or really any time of year, only to find that the doors were locked and the lights were off when the store should have been open, what type of impression would that leave you with? It is the same impression that consumers get when they try to visit a website that is inaccessible or not performing properly when they want to do business with that website.

We all know that downtime can be deadly to the success of an online business – especially one that is just starting up. We can put tools in place, such as a quality website monitoring service, to let us know that downtime is happening the moment it occurs. This allows us to get to work to resolve that downtime as quickly as humanly possible, but shouldn’t we also be taking it one step further? Shouldn’t we be on the lookout for the common pitfalls of website downtime so we can help avoid it altogether whenever possible?