Uptime measures the time a computer or a service is online and available. Despite this being merely a technical term which can be quickly brushed off, the uptime of your website plays a significant role in the well-being of your business. In order to understand how uptime contributes to a healthy business, we need to also discuss what happens in the opposite case of downtime.
Customer trust and loyalty
Providing a solid and uninterrupted service fosters stronger customer relationships. Nothing deteriorates your brand’s image faster than having your company’s website being unreachable by your customers. Even if your company has nothing to do with technology, outages compromise the loyalty of your customers. We live in an era where Internet connectivity and by extension, reachability, is considered similar to a utility that is always there, like electricity or water. The impact of downtime to your brand’s image and customer trust cannot be easily quantified, it depends on whether your business is 100% online, or not.
No wasted time
Service outages cost time. In the case of downtime, customers lose time trying to get a hold of you. You waste time communicating back and forth with your provider until the problem is solved, and lastly additional time is spent tracking down half-finished orders and customer issues. Lost time ultimately results in lost productivity. If your website is unreachable for 2 hours and the people in your company aren’t able to get work done, you effectively lose money equaled to the hourly rate of every employee * amount of downtime in hours. A website that functions uninterruptedly saves you from all of that.
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No lost revenue
This is probably the most important point of all. A website outage renders your products, services and your brand unavailable to the world for as long as the outage lasts. Customers aren’t able to purchase your products, you aren’t able to promote your goods and services and you lose money. However this depends on how much your business generates revenue from online means. An e-commerce site that depends 100% on uptime for revenue suffers more than a brick and mortar shop. A quick way to calculate lost revenue is to multiply the downtime in hours with the rate of revenue you have per hour. Then figure out the percentage according to how much your revenue streams depend on your website’s availability. If that value is let’s say 10% and you make $100/h, two hours of downtime would result in a loss of $20.
Better SEO ranking
Last but not least Google will track your website and will proceed to penalise it if it repeatedly finds it offline. Although downtime incidents even those of one day won’t probably hurt your website rank, a high uptime value does contributes to an overall good SEO score in the long-term.
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