Realising your website is offline can be one of the most stressful situations for any business. This is especially true if yours is an e-commerce site. Here, we have summarised some of the things you can do if your website goes offline and how to prevent it from happening in the future.
In a previous article, we saw that websites can appear to be offline for various reasons. We also went through the various checks you can do to find out what happened. But, once it is confirmed, what can you do if your website is offline? And how can you avoid being in the same situation in the future?
Below, we have compiled some of the things you can do to protect your site and increase its uptime.
What you can do if your site goes offline
Get in touch with your hosting provider
Speak with the technical support team of your hosting company and let them know about the problem. Sometimes, the solution is easier than it seems and they are equipped to fix most of the technical issues you may be facing.
Tell your customers
Let your visitors and customers know about the situation. If you are still able to send a newsletter, use it to let your users know about what is happening. You can tell them that your website is experiencing some technical issues and you are working on fixing them as soon as possible.
You should also use your social media channels to inform your followers. Do it both when you detect that the website is offline and also once it is back online, to let them know they can visit it again.
Downtime is sometimes inevitable, and your visitors will appreciate the fact that you were open and honest about what is happening. It’s also important they know you are keeping them updated so that they know when they can access your website again.
How to prevent downtime
High-quality hosting
If you find an issue with the network you can call your hosting company. They will have the ability to fix the network and/or restart the server.
Moving forward, make sure you avoid shared hosting companies, which tend to overcrowd servers. By using a shared host, you might be inadvertently sharing resources with hundreds of other sites. This can greatly impact your site’s performance and uptime.
Instead, find a hosting platform with 99.9% uptime and unlimited hosting or one that allows you to scale up your server size as your visitor traffic increases.
Patrick Internet offers unlimited web hosting, including a free domain, free wild-card SSL Certificate and Website Acceleration Suite to improve SEO for just £2.08 per month.
We also offer unlimited WordPress hosting, including automatic installation of WordPress, a free domain name for life and wildcard SSL certificate for all your domains. Our WordPress hosting includes staging so that you can redesign your website offline without causing any issues or downtime.
Security
No matter the size of your business, you need to protect your website with the best firewall protection and SSL certificates. These will ensure all data sent to and from our servers is encrypted.
Check your passwords are strong, with a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters. Also, make sure you have firewall protection activated. And if you are using WordPress, it is also important to check that you are using the latest version of it and the plugins you have installed. Many updates are designed to protect your website against new vulnerabilities.
You also need to choose a hosting platform that provides you with strong security features.
At Patrick Internet, we use SSL certificates that ensure all data sent to and from our servers is encrypted, keeping your website safe.
Back up data
It is also important to make sure you always have up to date back up data of your site. This will allow you to restore to the last version of your website if necessary.
Patrick Internet takes a snapshot of your WordPress installation and database, every single day, and stores them for 30 days. So if something happens, for instance, due to an error caused by a plugin update, you can always roll back to the last backup, using timeline backups.
CDN
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) enhance the speed of your site by storing a cached version of a site’s content in multiple locations and delivering the closest version to each user.
CDNs work by storing a cached version of your website. This means they can keep on providing content to your users even if the site is down. Additionally, they can also help with cybersecurity by protecting you from malicious bots.
If you host your website with us, you already have free CDN. This makes your site a secure, fast-loading and highly optimised website with enterprise-level connectivity.
At Patrick Internet, we offer monitoring capabilities in our client area. If your website is hosted with us, you will always know what is happening to your site at all times. Find out more about our hosting solutions here.
