If you’ve put a lot of time, effort, energy and money into building a responsive website with a beautiful design, you might think that your work is over. That is not the case. It is great that you have your website put together and looking good, but if it is down, how can anyone see it? In this article, we are going to talk more about downtime, what causes, how you can decrease it and why it affects your sales.
What Does Downtime Look Like?
Have you ever gone to one of your favorite sites just to get an error. No doubt you were pretty upset, but you probably didn’t think about it too much if you hit refresh and the site came up. This short amount of downtime might have distracted a less excited user, but you hit the refresh because you’re serious about getting to the site.
If your site is down, it can look different to each user and it can look different depending on what is causing the downtime. Here are some ways it can manifest:
- Onscreen http errors
- Pages with malicious content
- Dead pages with nothing to load
- Slow load times aka soft downtime
Soft downtime is when your site isn’t really down but it is performing so low that it can’t operate as it should.
Sites that aren’t functioning properly make people nervous and you could lose a potential customer simply because your site is performing badly. If your site is down all together, they won’t even have the option to do business with you because the site won’t be working. Poor down time on your site equals a poor reputation for your business.
Building Trust Online
If you want to make sales online your company and your website needs to have the trust of the customer. If the customers don’t trust you or they think that you are going to somehow compromise their information, they are likely to click away from your site.
Trust is everything when you are selling online so make sure that your site provides that for the user by offering a great experience which including a high percentage of up time. If you aren’t sure if your website is up or down, you can use a website uptime status checker to see in real time if you site is up or not.
What Downtime Means to You
Think of your website going down as locking up your doors on your shop. You’ve closed up to go home for the night. The only problem is, when you are running an online store or other type of site, you don’t have to close up so this is costing you serious money. People from all over the world are awake and could be wanting your product but if your site is down, they won’t be able to purchase your product or service.
If your website is down, it could be due to a hacker. You need to make sure that you track your uptime for your site as this will allow you to notice any irregularities that might be happening with your site. If you are worried that you could be under attack, there are security measures you can take to make sure that your site stays safe.
Understand The Performance of Your Site
If you don’t understand your site’s performance and statistics, you need to learn how to read them. Knowing what your site is doing and how it is operating is very important.
There are many tools that you can use but one of the great free options comes from Google itself. You will be able to use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to check your site and make sure that it is functioning properly and giving you the results that you want.
You can set up different goals in Google Analytics that will allow you to track and see how you are doing with each of the things that you are trying to accomplish. You are able to set up custom reports and more with these trusted products.
While there are some technical things that you have to do, there are a lot of things that you can work on to make sure that you are getting the best results even if you don’t have a lot of technical knowledge.
Working on Conversions
Once you have your site downtime decreased and are able to keep your site up and running, you will want to work on your conversions. Increasing the conversion rate in any or all of the area that you are working on is important.
There are plenty of things that you can work on in terms of how your website is converting. You can work on your CTR in the search engines, the percentage of people that view your opt-in form and actually subscribe and more. Increasing your conversion rate allows you to get more results out of the same amount of traffic which means an increase in ROI.
Making sure to line up every part of your site to work together as a powerful sales machine will help you increase sales and decrease the expenses that you pay out every month in order to bring in business. This all starts with making sure that your site is up so that you can work on these conversions without worrying that no one will be able to see them.
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