There are several reasons why there may be downtime, including server overload, malicious attacks, code problems, and other mistakes. However, the outcome of the downtime is more important than the cause of the outage. In either case, a user who accesses a broken website will leave.

In this article, we’ll go over some best practices for preventing downtime on your WordPress website. In this manner, you may keep your website online and completely operational for users. And to yourself in terms of having access to the back-end at all.

Why It’s Important to Prevent Website Downtime

It’s essential that you keep your website accessible whenever a user tries to access it, day or night. For your visitors, it raises a big red signal if parts of your website are missing or not working. Consider that this is their first time visiting your website. If they are unable to reach you the first time, do you believe they will try again? Unlikely.

Your website must portray professionalism and knowledge, which is crucial. Additionally, the security and comfort of your website’s visitors should be a priority. You won’t make a good first impression if there is intermittent or even ongoing downtime. more so if you are employed by a SaaS company.

You probably also lose money if website visitors stop coming. Any website, no matter its size, can benefit from this. Downtime on websites may be quite expensive for businesses. Significant or severe website failures cost 62% of respondents more than $100,000, according to Uptime Institute data from 2021. In addition, 15% of the website failures cost over $1 million.

You might not manage a website that generates as much income as, for instance, Amazon, which lost $3.48 million and $66,240 per minute in 2013 due to downtime. However, the truth is that downtime will cost your site money even if it generates revenue.

Additionally, it goes beyond financial success or attracting new customers. SEO is also harmed by downtime. Google and other search engines can become frustrated when a website is unavailable. That’s because an increase in bounce rates indicates that users aren’t sticking around. Your SERP ranking and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) can decline the more frequently this occurs.

Six best practices for avoiding website outages

So how can website downtime be avoided? While the danger of downtime associated with having an online presence is always present, it is manageable. Let’s look at a few methods for achieving this.

1. Choose a Reputable Web Hosting Company

Various factors that you can control will assist you in preventing downtime. However, because they focus on hosting, there are many things you can’t do. That implies your first step should be to choose a reliable website host with a track record of having a little downtime. Make sure you choose a host that provides ample storage space, a secure domain, consistent uptime, a reasonable price, and a helpful customer care team to assist in the event of a problem. Finding a server that can handle the volume of traffic you expect is also crucial.

When it comes to pricing, try not to gouge; you’ll get what you paid for.

Regarding finances, many hosting companies offer tiered pricing structures with lower costs for newly launched websites. Take your time comparing prices for the type of site you require before registering. Make sure your host provides the tech integrations you need

Look at some of the good hosting companies, who are all reliable options, have plans to suit most budgets, and are optimized for sites:

• Flywheel is ideal for website owners looking to build a fast website and hand it off to clients.
• Pressable was developed by the minds behind WordPress and WooCommerce and features 24/7 customer support from the experts on WordPress.
• Siteground provides pre-installed and configured WordPress and WordPress from the moment you start a site.
• Cloudways is a managed hosting provider that’s great for larger businesses, such as agencies, and offers modular services and features.

Finding a web host that can meet the special requirements of your website and can guarantee uptime is the key here.

2. Improving Site Security

You can reduce the likelihood of website downtime by making sure your site is as secure as possible. This is because a secure website serves as a deterrent to hackers, DDOS assaults, and other unwanted behaviour that can cause it to go offline. However, adding a plugin is not enough to ensure a site’s safety. There are many steps required.

• Make sure the URL begins with HTTPS. Your website server ought to have an SSL/TLS certificate already installed. If that isn’t an option, there are a couple more ways to obtain a free SSL certificate.
• Switch all pages on your WordPress website from HTTP to HTTPS.
• If there are still issues with mixed content on your website, fix them.
• Check plugins and themes for any required upgrades and potential compatibility issues.
• Increase the security of the forms your users fill out by adding CAPTCHA.
• To make sure all security holes in your website have been closed, perform a thorough WordPress security audit.
• Install the appropriate WordPress security plugins.

3. Keep an eye on the performance of your site.

Your website will suffer if the loading time is too slow because page speed has an impact on your SEO rankings in the SERPs. Your site may appear to be offline due to slow loading times even if it is not. That alone will cause many users to automatically dismiss you.

More than ever, Google gives websites rankings based on user experience; therefore, you should check that your site’s performance is adequate. Even worse, if there are too many requests being sent back and forth, the server may occasionally cease responding. For the same reason, you could even lock up the user’s browser.

Keep an eye on your Google Analytics dashboard to track statistics like your site’s bounce rate and speed. Additionally, you can use performance tracking tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix to execute a site speed test.

4. Create frequent site backups

You’ll need to regularly create site backups in case of a serious website outage, such as a malicious attack that takes down your entire site. You should, if at all possible, choose a managed hosting service that offers automatic site backups as a starting point. A WordPress site management service that you pay for can also assist in reducing this risk. Finally, a fantastic backup plugin can assist you in developing a regular backup routine, of course, it goes without saying that you should never rely on a plugin alone.

Your chances of swiftly restoring the site to a recent version increase significantly the more backups you have created. Additionally, having more regular backups makes it possible to guarantee that no content is lost in the event that your website does go offline.

5. Learn About HTTP Error Codes That Cause Downtime

It’s critical to know which HTTP error codes may cause a website to go offline. Here are a few of the most typical HTTP error codes:

• Overusing 301 and 302 redirects causes the error “Err Too Many Redirects”.
• Error 403, which prevents users from accessing your website, is frequently brought on by permission or file token error.
• Error 404, which can occur either as a server error or as a user error,
• Error 410, which indicates that the user’s sought-after information is no longer available.
• Error 429 prevents users from accessing your website and denotes either server overload or a potential DDOS attack.
• Error 500, which indicates a server-side internal error that has made your website unavailable. 
• Error 501 is a server-side error that signals your website is fully down.
• Error 502, informs website owners that users are unable to access the site because traffic is being sent through the incorrect gateway.
• Error 503, a transitory HTTP error, could also indicate that your server or firewalls need to be reset.
• Error 508 indicates that your server’s resources and capacity have been exhausted and it is unable to load your website.

6. Hire A Skilled Developer For the Assistance

Having a self-hosted WordPress website implies that occasionally you may need to seek assistance from a skilled developer. If you don’t know how to code yourself, this is especially true.

Even the most skilled among us have hacked a live site and created downtime. However, involving a professional can help you secure everything and tighten any screws that might come loose and bring the entire structure down.

One option is to commission the creation of your website from scratch by a skilled WordPress web developer. In this manner, there is a lower likelihood that the site will be taken down due to incorrect or missing sections. Working with someone who has experience creating several websites could assist in avoiding setup and code errors that might affect uptime.

Even if that’s not the case, it might be worthwhile to hire one to review your website once it has been developed. Having an extra set of eyes to conduct a site audit can be beneficial if you want to avoid downtime. Anything that can spot possible issues and reduce the risk of future website outages.

Conclusion

Any website owner wants their site to be available, but achieving 100% uptime is not realistic. To ensure that percentage is as close to 100 as possible, there are many things you may do. If your website goes down too frequently, you not only miss out on new clients, customers, and money, but you also lose the trust of those who try to access your website when it’s down. It’s time to start putting some of the finest precautions you can take to avoid website downtime into practice now that you’ve read about them.