When a website is down, it’s difficult to estimate the implications and the true cost can vary based on the business model and the website purpose. New website visitors are unlikely to return to your website if they find it down the first time, Frequent visitors might on the other hand return, but these too could have their experience tarnished with the downtime.
Downtime typically means potential loss of business but the are other elements in play which could increase your costs.
Customer Acquisition
New Customer Acquisition is a very expensive process and loosing such leads can lead to loss of business in the day / weeks to follow. When your website is down or having issues, your inward funnels attracting leads such as adverts, ad-words etc are still sending visitors to your website These leads will most likely be lost having spent your credits with no gain for your business.
Low Quality
A website that is down especially if frequently could potentially leave a bad impression on your customers. Customer could move to social platforms and lave bad reviews and bad comments leaving you to deal with the bad reputation for the weeks to come.
SLA / Compliance
Depending on your business model, if your site offers a service, having it down can lead to paybacks if you are in breach of your Service Level Agreements (SLA). This could deepen the wound for you apart from loosing business having to give credit to your existing customers.
Loss of Advertisements
If your website has adverts then downtime would also mean less income from adverts listed on the website.
There are various steps you can take to avoid being down, but no solution is 100%. Sometimes some issues are outside of your control, and the only remedy is to be immediately alerted. So make sure that you are alerted on downtime. You can then take immediate action, making sure your IT staff knows about the issue, Marketing teams can also be alerted and disable the ad spending, and post on social media that you are working on the issue. This is a way of doing damage control and reduce the impact as much as possible.
So give Netumo a try, it’s free. Visit www.netumo.com
