What to Do When Your Website Goes Down

What to Do When Your Website Goes DownCredit JMiks/Shutterstock Without a functioning website, customers cant find your business, buy your products or learn more about what you do. Building and maintaining a website requires effort, and even when you do everything right, your website can still go down.In the era of the internet, your business website is your identity to the world thats your gateway, said Greg Scott, an author and cybersecurity expert with more than two decades of experience. When the website goes down, get on the phone and start making calls Youd better make sure you have a web hoster that has a good reputation for quality customer support.Whether your businesss website has been the victim of a cyberattack or questionable web hosting services, its important to know what to do once your site is down. Your response time and action plan can help you get your site back up and running quickly.Its also crucial to communicate with your custome rs and be erkennbar about the issue. There are several ways to do this, including updating social media accounts or creating a status page to update your customers.Editors bedrngnise If your website does go down, its important to have all your important data backed up. Find a cloud backup solution thats right for your business by filling out the below questionnaire. Youll be connected with our vendor partners, who can provide free information and help you make the right decision.Find out if your site is actually downThe first and (arguably) most important step is to find out if your website is actually down. Alastair McDermott is a website designer and developer who works with business owners on increasing online sales. He founded his own company, WebsiteDoctor, in 2007 and said sometimes a site can appear to be down because of network problems. McDermott said its best to try and access your site from a mobile device or another network entirely.Sometimes the website owner is actuall y looking at the site and it looks to be down to them, but everybody is seeing it and its OK, he said.The saatkorn holds true when a business owner makes changes to their site. Often, after a change is made, the browser renders a cached version of the site, which is a previous version saved by the browser for faster load times. This can make things confusing if a change has been made and it isnt rendering. It can also be deceiving if your site has gone down or been restored, because the browser is depicting a cached version.McDermott said business owners can use third-party websites to verify that their site is actually down. There are several of these sites listed on a simple Google search.Important steps to take if your website is downOnce youve established that your website is really down, there are a few steps you can take. The most important step, of course, is contacting your web hosting provider to find out whats wrong. Before doing this, however, McDermott said its a good id ea to double check your schmelzglas to make sure your hosting service didnt alert you to scheduled downtime due to maintenance.If they havent, its a good idea to talk to other employees within your company. If someone was working on the site, updating plugins or making adjustments, it could have caused the crash.Its really logical was somebody working on it today? he said.If this is the case, you can try and troubleshoot the changes to identify which adjustment caused the website to go down and then proceed from there. Regardless of the method, its important to establish a process to determine why your site has gone down.Youve have to find out why it happened, because youve got to try and prevent it from happening again, McDermott said.While your site is down, there are some important steps you can take to stay in touch with your customers. Tammy Butow is a Principal SRE at Gremlin, a company that tests website weaknesses through chaos engineering. Butow said companies should creat e a status page to alert customers about the issue.Customers expect to get updated when you have downtime and they are impacted, she said.Butow recommended using statuspage.io to create a hosted status page. Its important for this page not to go down with your website. You can also send alerts and communicate with customers via social media, although this may not be the most direct way to inform customers arriving at your site.If your own troubleshooting fails, its time to call your web hosting company. Many web hosting companies offer live chat, phone and emaille support. The support features are among the most important features to look for while youre shopping for the right web hosting service.How to prevent downtimeMcDermott said there are a few quick things business owners can do to help decrease the severity of a website crisis.For starters, he suggests hosting your domain name and website with two separate companies. This practice may be disputed by some professionals, but Mc Dermotts logic is moving a website from one shared hosting provider to another is a relatively simple process while moving a domain name can be very complicated.If you host your domain and website with the same company and it goes dark, it can be a major challenge to get your site back up and running with another company.If youve got them separate, at least you can get it back up quickly, he said.He said its a good idea to host your email service provider with a separate company for the same reason. Besides separating your hosting provider, McDermott said business owners should try and keep their own backups of their website. If youre running a WordPress site, there are several plugins that can do this for you. If you have another type of site, this may be more of a challenge, but there are still some tools out there that can help.One of the biggest tips McDermott provided involved web hosting plans He said its best to pay month to month at first. Many web hosting companies try and attract new customers with low-cost annualized plans. If you arent familiar with the service, paying monthly is a good way to feel out the companys service offering, even if it is more expensive at first.The bottom lineYour website going down is a big deal, and its important to treat the issue as such. There are some ways to mitigate the damage before it occurs, like having your own backups, but once your site is down, youre at the mercy of your hosting provider. When it happens, its important to stay calm and logical and work through the situation.It depends on how you react in stressful situations, McDermott said. You can either go into cold logic, into Mr. Spock mode, or you can panic and run around. Matt DAngelo Matt DAngelo is a Tech Staff Writer based in New York City. After graduating from James Madison University with a degree in Journalism, Matt gained exp erience as a copy editor and writer for newspapers and various online publications. Matt joined the staff in 2017 and covers technology for Business.com and Business News Daily. 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