When your website goes offline there are many factors for you to contemplate as a priority, like the loss in traffic and sales and/or leads. However, another factor to contemplate is how a period of downtime will affect your standing in search engines like Google.

Website downtime correlates directly with lost rankings in search, which successively results in a long-term loss of traffic for weeks and months after the initial period of downtime say the Web Design Jacksonville experts.

But what if your website only goes offline for a brief period of your time, would you continue to be facing a decline in your hard-won search rankings? During this article, we take a glance at how Google analyzes and interprets downtime, and what a number of the senior figures at Google have said about how downtime relates to SEO.

In today’s world, there’s no such thing as business hours. To serve your users 24*7, lots of effort goes into maintaining the website and keeping the business online. But what about website downtime? Have you ever considered them? Unplanned downtime poses a vital impact on your sales and revenue. regardless of what you’re selling, if you’re unavailable to your customers, they’ll move to your competitors. You don’t want that, do you?

Downtime also called the “outage duration” is a term that refers to the amount of when a system is functionally unavailable to be used. Even Facebook and Twitter experience occasional outages, but if you’re getting plenty of it, you must be anxious.

Today, we’ll discuss:

• What Causes Downtime?
• How website downtime impacts your SEO and search rank?
• What to try and do sooner?
• Protecting yourself against downtime

What Causes Downtime?

Your website is down for several reasons. The great news is you’ll fix website downtime as long as you recognize what’s causing it says the Web Design Jacksonville experts.

More than half the time, your website is down thanks to poor-quality website hosting. If server downtime is your regular visitor, it’s time to change to a replacement hosting provider. Try finding a hosting service that contains a solid uptime record and focuses on the tool you employ to create your website, i.e. Joomla, WordPress, etc. Not only will they make sure you have 99.99% uptime, but they’re also going to monitor the performance of your site and notify you beforehand of any possible downtimes.

CMS Issues like database errors or installing incompatible extensions may result in downtime. From DDoS attacks, malicious hackers, and lack of maintenance & backups to DNS issues, there are various reasons why your website might be down.

A website is often down for varied reasons. But regardless of the explanation for the downtime, they’ll all be fixed and even prevent future occurrences for as long as you recognize what caused the downtime. The following are a number of explanations for why your website may be down.

1. HARDWARE FAILURE:

Hardware failure is the favorite reason for quite 50% of all downtime for many websites. Whether or not you think that you have got your bases covered with levels of redundancy, multiple power supplies, and network controllers, at some point in time the hardware may succumb to failure or be eaten by rodents and cause your website to travel offline.

2. POOR QUALITY WEBSITE HOSTING:

Your website could also be down because of poor-quality website hosting. Your hosting company will be a contributing factor to your website downtime if they lack quality requirements to host websites, irrespective of what number percentages of up-time they promised, you’ll still experience downtime and also the funny thing is you will not really know the way much downtime your website is experiencing because the hosting company won’t share the precise amount of downtime your website encounter with you except you’ve got a web site monitoring software in situ.

3. CMS ISSUES:

Your website can experience downtimes because of issues associated with Content Management systems, irrespective of the kind you employ. The problems may arise from the installation of incompatible plugins, modules, and extensions to database errors and internal conflicts within the software installed. These and plenty of more CMS-related issues can cause your website to be completely down or load partially.

4. DNS ISSUES:

Another reason behind website downtime is DNS-related issues. you’ll be able to experience downtime if there’s a slip in DNS configuration whether or not you misspelled your name-server your site may be down. Sometimes your website is also awaiting the DNS to properly propagate.

5. DDOS ATTACKS:

A DDoS attack is understood as a denial of service attack and could be a cyber-attack during which the perpetrators seek to form server resources unavailable to their intended users by overwhelming the target server with a flood of internet traffic. This incoming traffic flooding the victim server usually originates from different sources and also the perpetrators make love for various reasons starting from fraud to revenge.

Even if your site isn’t the intended target, if your site shares the identical server with the target website (if you’re on a shared hosting plan) unless your site contains a dedicated server, you will face downtime when your site becomes the victim of casualty only for sharing the identical server that hosts the positioning that was the target of the attack.

6. MALICIOUS HACKERS:

If your site has any weaknesses in security or has any penetrable breaches in any respect, a hacker may find it and convey it down simply because they’ll. If your website is at risk of the attacks of those hackers they will bring your website down and cause serious harm to your business. Although, having a 100% secure website is sort of impossible, for you never know where the subsequent threat is coming from.

7. LACK of normal MAINTENANCE:

If you’ve got the habit of leaving your website for a protracted time without updating your scripts and plugins, your website may face catastrophic downtime. So, you want to always ensure everything is functioning properly on your website, unless you are doing this there are chances that lapses in maintenance could lead to website downtime unexpectedly.

How website downtime impacts your SEO and search rank?

Google bots check your website for brand new content and backend updates and when a website greets Googlebot with an interior server error code, for example, a 500 internal error. The Googlebot tries to re-crawl the website throughout the day to test if it’s up again, during this era your website will experience a visit to Google search ranking results say the experts from Website Design Company. The longer your website is down, the more Google penalizes your ranking, and also the reason for this is often that Google doesn’t wish to keep dead sites within the search results.

The impact of site downtime is something every online business owner has to take seriously, except for worrying about losing money, sales, memberships, and clients’ loyalty because of downtime. you furthermore may have to worry about the loss of traffic thanks to the call your Google rankings. in step with Matt Cutts, “A little downtime in your website will affect your website ranking in how. Google ranks a website that supports what it finds while it crawls the website, so if it doesn’t find anything, it can’t rank or reindex it.”

Though, the length of your time that your ranking drops varies from each day or two to many weeks counting on the length of downtime your website experienced. If the downtime is brief and Google doesn’t come crawling before the server is duplicated, the search engines may not even notice the downtime. you’re rated to support what search engines have not crawled. For example, if your website experienced downtime at 12:00 a.m. in the night and comes back online at 1: 00 a.m., and if Googlebot doesn’t crawl your website during that one 1 hour of downtime, then your ranking performance won’t be impacted.

The truth is that downtime is inevitable sometimes, it happens to each site. Sites can experience downtime thanks to maintenance on the websites, when this happens it’s understandable by Google. However, if a site is down frequently or for long periods of time when bots crawl, it’ll have a bearing on the performance of the positioning and reduce the search engine’s ranking of such an internet site. The longer the outage periods the more the location drops in search ranking, which may keep potential customers aloof from your site and increase your bounce rate and increase in bounce rate also affect your search index.

What to try and do sooner?

Website downtimes are extremely stressful, and one of the most important challenges site owners face. However, if you propose and act accordingly, you’ll make it less stressful.

• Deploy a Backup Server:

Most of the hosting providers will notify before maintenance (downtime). Meanwhile, you’ll launch a backup server to remain online. For instance, when one region is down, another region remains up. So, deploy a server temporarily in its region and keep your site online. Once the native server is back, then you’ll change your DNS to come back to your origin server.

• Employ a Content Delivery Network:

CDN could be a geographically distributed network of caching servers that store a cached version of the site’s content. So, when a website is down, in some cases it’ll act as a buffer to still deliver content to the users. We highly recommend employing a CDN to forestall downtime!

• Get reliable web hosting and web monitoring:

We’ve mentioned this before, and we are going to mention it again. Get yourself a reliable web hosting that contains a solid uptime record and may handle heavy traffic. Going cheap is merely visiting causing you to suffer excessive downtime.

• Protecting yourself against downtime:

Downtime can have a negative impact on any business since the website is the medium of communication between clients and business owners. You must make an everyday habit to copy your website’s content both locally and within the cloud in order that once you experience downtime you’ll quickly restore the recent backup without losing customers. Because website downtimes can extremely be stressful, and one of the largest challenges but is overcome with proper planning ahead. The subsequent steps may prepare you simply just in case downtime happens to your business.

# Always use reliable web hosting:

Get reliable web hosting that features a solid uptime record and might handle heavy traffic. Before you decide on a hosting company, ensure their claim about giving you 99.9% uptime is valid by reading online reviews about such hosting companies. Reliable web hosting won’t only keep your website up all the time it’ll also improve your site performance greatly, if your site takes forever to load it’ll definitely affect your SEO, employing a cheap hosting company is risky and not beneficial to your business.

# Backup your website:

It’s informed to have a backup server with a separate hosting company just in case your primary server crashes or is under maintenance. This method will enable you to point your DNS to your backup server and keep your site online with no delay while you anticipate your original server to come back in order that you’ll be able to point your DNS back to the initial server.

# Use a content delivery network:

A content delivery network could be a geographically distributed network of proxy servers to supply high performance by storing and distributing all cached content of your website content to the users and so protecting you from downtime. Leveraging a CDN with a backup host can even protect your website from experiencing downtime. Cloudflare offers both free and paid plans betting on your needs

# Employ an internet site monitoring services:

An internet site monitoring service is a web tool that checks and verifies that your site is up and dealing with which your clients can use the website obviously. The website monitoring service tool interacts with your website to verify that it is working for sure and warn you accordingly by email or text if the website goes down or notice the load time is slow.

Downtime and Site speed are the 2 most vital metrics that Google considers in ranking a website. Site speed and system downtime have sway at the algorithm level, Google did this to enable users to possess a friendly experience while using searching online, it’s not about Google, it’s all about users. So, whatever thing on your website that hinders user experience is probably going to harm your search engine rankings.

Site downtime and slow loading time can have a negative impact on your brand as a whole. but losing sales and money also creates a negative impression of your business. If you’ve been experiencing downtime on your website and it takes an eternity for the positioning to load, it’s time you consult with an expert to assist you to fix it in order that Google won’t penalize you the most.