Today, it has become a typical trend for customers to go online for shopping. Unlike in olden days where customers are used to brick and mortar businesses, the trend has been changed to online presence. It has become mandatory for a business to have a website – whether it is a small or large scale business. Having no website means, the business is missing out on opportunities for reaching customers.
Beyond having a website, the business should also focus on creating great online experince to the customers. But remember, there is no question of online experience if the site is frequently down for users. Those who have websites should primarily think about providing uninterrupted web services to the users before making an effort for enhancing customer experience. Try to avoid website downtime issues and have essential services like site monitoring for improving performance. Another element that influence user experience is the usefulness of the website. For instance, if the site is focusing on making money through online ads, then the best thing that can be done is to use a good ad server technology for serving better user ad experince. Similarly there are different aspects such as design, content, functionality, usability etc that require attention for making the site customer friendly.
So, lets look at the reasons how a website can go down and create bad user experience to the customers.
Natural Disaster
There could be interruptions to the website services due to the occurance of power failure, storm disrupting local networks or cyclones hitting the data centers and many others. It’s hard to predict how a natural disaster is going to affect the services of websites. When such instances happen, websites go offline, which may cause frustration to online customers.
Hosting Matters
Typically, websites are hosted on the servers which is maintained & controlled by the hosting service. Having a low quality host may affect the site functionality. In order to stay connected, get protection from natural disasters (floods and storms) and backup of website data the hosting service has to be good. Hosting also takes care of allocation of website resources and bandwidth.
Server Overloaded
When more number of people access the same website at same time, it leads to server overload and reduces the efficiency. Website has to be properly optimized for handling heavy traffics. If the hosting resources are low, then it is better to upgrade the resources to a higher plan for taking care of heavy traffics.
Keep Away From Hacking
Hackers have many different ways to hack the websites for different purposes. Customers typically avoid such websites when they see pop up saying”this website may harm your computer”. Sometimes it becomes hard to fugure out the reason for hacking and the process may prolong site downtime duration.
Down for Maintenance
As website has to be updated time to time and when required, it involves new software upgrades to be implemented. This is a planned downtime where the hosting service may take the site down for regular maintenance. To let the customer know that the site is under maintenance, it is necessary to display error message on the main page of website.
DNS ( Domain Name System) Problem
Domain name system is like contact book that convert domian name or website name into IP address. DNS errors occur when there is a network failure or when server can not communicate with network. When DNS issues happen, the site will not work for customers until the problem gets resolved from the network service provider.