It is obvious that downtime leads to conversion loss. But it can also negatively impact your SEO and lead to reputational damage. In this article we explain how you, together with your hosting provider, can prevent this.
What is downtime?
Downtime is a term that is used to refer to a period of time in which a system is not available. In e-commerce, downtime specifically refers to the time a visitor cannot reach a webshop. In most cases downtime is the result of a system failing to function. This can be caused by many things, for example system, application or storage failures, human errors or cyberattacks.
Downtime quickly adds up
If you have 99,9% uptime, which is a lot, it still comes down to 8.77 hours of downtime per year. This equals to 43 minutes downtime per month. You can imagine how quickly this adds up if your uptime is 99.5% or 99%. Simply put: An unavailable web shop costs you money.
When your shop goes offline…
Every minute your shop is unavailable, you miss out on revenue. Potential customers cannot reach your site and therefore cannot find information about your brand and your products. Most importantly, no purchases can be made as your shop is down.
Also reputational damage results from downtime. Your customers expect your shop to be online 24/7/365. If your webshop is not available, customers get irritated and it’s quite likely they start spreading negative word of mouth via Social Media. This damages your brand image, and you are at great risk of losing existing and new customers.
The Effect of downtime on SEO and SEA
Negative impact on your SEO ranking
Your customers aren’t the only ones who won’t appreciate your web shop being offline; Google doesn’t like it either. If the Google crawler gets an internal server error (error 500), this has negative consequences for your position in the search results.
Negative impact on your SEA
If your shop is offline and you use advertisements, the ads send traffic to an online store that is not available even though you’re paying for those ads. This is of course a waste of your SEA budget.
How hosting impacts the uptime of your webshop
The quality of your e-commerce hosting has a major impact on the uptime and therefore availability of your webshop. But there are many more factors why hosting impacts your online success. If you want to know more, please download our Whitepaper about The importance of hosting in Conversion Optimization!
In this extensive paper we address the commercial value of e-commerce hosting and explain why the choice of a hosting provider is not only a technical, but also a commercial decision.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us!
Hi! My name is Dion, Account Manager at Hypernode
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