Best Website Uptime Practices for 2015: Is Your Online Business Ready?

Is your business website ready to minimize downtime and ensure maximized uptime throughout 2015? Since website downtime is one of largest threats to your company's profits, you need to do everything you can to ensure that your site isn't down a second more than it has to be throughout the New Year. If you want to maximize your website's uptime and, thereby, maximize your online profits, here are some practices you need to put into place for 2015.

1. Check Your Hosting Package

Take a good look at your hosting package. Is it unlimited but on a shared server where other sites with "unlimited" bandwidth may affect the performance of your own site? Are you nearing the monthly bandwidth allocated to your "fixed" hosting plan? Has your hosting company been performing up to par, or has it had excessive periods of downtime that could have been avoided or at least handled more effectively? If you answer yes to any of these questions, you need to take a close look at what you should be doing about your current hosting situation. Either upgrade to a dedicated hosting plan with your own server, sign up for a fixed hosting plan that offers more bandwidth than you need so your site won't go down due to bandwidth overages, or switch hosting providers altogether if your hosting provider's uptime isn't reliable.

2. Optimize Your Site for Performance

Not only is website uptime important, but the performance of your site while it is up and running is important as well. If your pages are taking more than three seconds to load, you are likely losing customers. Optimize your pages, including images and scripts, to run quickly and effectively, minimizing page load times. Increased performance really does result in increased sales.

3. Put a Contingency Plan into Place

If you do not yet have a contingency plan in place, late is better than never. As we come into 2015, it I now time to put that plan into action. What will you do if your hosting provider goes down for two or three hours, or even two or three days? Will you just ride out the storm, rolling with the punches and taking the loss of profits that come with that downtime? You need to have backup hosting in place with a backup of your site saved on the backup host's servers. That way, if extended downtime occurs due to an error on your hosting provider's end, you can put your contingency plan into action and minimize the profit loss your website could experience.

4. Enlist the Help of a Quality Website Monitoring Service

When it comes to minimizing website downtime, no tool in your arsenal is as powerful as that of a quality website monitoring service. You can't possibly monitor your site manually 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. What if downtime occurs at one in the morning and you don't find out about it until you wake up and check your email at eight? If you have a quality website monitoring service keeping a hawk's eye on your site for you, the website monitoring service will notify you immediately if downtime occurs or seems imminent due to a significant decrease in site performance. This allows you to go to work sooner rather than later to fix the problem and save the sales you would otherwise lose due to extended website downtime. If you saw more than your fair share of profit loss due to website downtime in 2014, you have a chance to turn the tables in 2015 and ensure your website downtime is minimized, allowing you to maximize your profits. Make sure you put the above practices into place so you can be sure your site is up and ready for your visitors when they want it, and that you don't lose search rankings, sales, leads, or profits due to unnecessary website downtime issues. Remember, when it comes to fighting downtime, the best defense is a well-planned offence.