When your business relies on technology to run smoothly and be successful, uptime is critical. Website availability is an important aspect of any eCommerce business because it’s a metric that measures how accessible your site is to your users. For smaller businesses, website availability might not be a the biggest challenge for your online store, but for large retailers, even a few seconds of downtime could result in thousands of dollars in lost sales.
99.99% availability is the standard goal for many businesses. Google, for example, aims for 99.999% with about 5 minutes of downtime per year. Here’s a breakdown of how much downtime per year is expected for each percentage point:
- 99% – Around 3.5 days
- 99.5% – Under 2 days
- 99.9% – 8 hours
- 99.95% – 4.5 hours
- 99.99% – 1 hour
- 99.999% – Slightly over 5 minutes
- 99.9999% – Around 30 seconds, extremely rare and difficult to maintain
Shopify is an eCommerce platform that claims to have a goal of 99.99% website availability, but a few years ago a 3.5 hour outage resulted in one seasonal retailer losing over 20k in revenue. In 2019, Facebook experienced an outage that lasted for 14 hours, resulting in losses of over $90 million. A study from Gartner in 2016 raised the average cost of downtime per minute to around $9,000. For retailers who have high-traffic eCommerce stores with thousands of orders a minute, a 14 hour outage would be a devastating financial loss.
Ultimately, website accessibility has several implications for your brand and your business:
How Website Availability Impacts Your Business
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is certainly a concern when considering website availability as your customers may not want to shop with you in the future if they have a bad experience even once. It isn’t just about the sales you lose when your website is down, it’s all of the future sales you may miss from those potential customers that may have become loyal supporters. Optimal website availability is a great way to improve the customer experience.
Reputation
If your website is frequently unavailable, customers and stakeholders will start to notice. This can negatively impact your brand image, which can deter potential customers from giving you a chance at all. Build brand trust by delivering an experience customers can depend on every time they visit your site.
Legal Concerns
For websites that host sensitive data like financial institutions and healthcare organizations, extended outages can put customer data at risk. This can lead to compliance violations.
SEO
Your search engine has a variety of parameters that serve to prioritize one website over another when populating the search results page. There are many aspects of your site that impact your search ranking, and website availability is one of them. For additional SEO best practices, read more here.
How Can eCommerce Teams Optimize Site Uptime?
Not only do outages result in energy and resource expenditure from your team, but frequent downtime can be stressful for your staff. If your employees are constantly tackling an availability crisis, they may be less likely to want to stay on your team long term.
We know that downtime can be a major issue for eCommerce merchants but it’s an unavoidable challenge that all businesses who utilize technology will encounter. Websites can be extremely complex, so it’s impossible to truly know what’s working properly and what needs improvement at all times. What can development teams do to respond and get sites back up and running?
Recovery Planning
You’re already aware of the impending likelihood of an outage, don’t wait until after you lose thousands in revenue to do damage control. Time is precious, you shouldn’t have to scramble to get your site back up when you could be spending that time on high value tasks. Your disaster recovery plan should be detailed yet flexible, so your team is prepared to tackle anything that might occur.
Prevention
You can’t totally prevent an outage. Make sure to update outdated systems and monitor your site regularly to catch any issues before they become unmanageable. The best way to prevent an outage is by starting with an eCommerce platform that can handle high traffic.
Clear Communication
If your site goes down, you will save your support team a lot of time if you let your customers know you acknowledge the outage and are actively working to fix the problem. Post on your social networks and wherever you can, this can help control some of the fallout for your public image.
Back Up Content
In the case of an inevitable outage, downtime can occasionally result in irreparable damage to the core functionality of your site. You can use apps that are designed to back up essential data, or store alternative versions of your store so you can always revert back to a previous version if your newest update causes too much damage.
Always Be Testing
There are free tools you can use to monitor and test page loading speed, these sometimes come with your platform provider automatically as well. Conduct user testing to visualize a variety of customer journeys and identify anywhere where there may be an issue before it’s too late. There are even tools that monitor your site availability automatically, so you can conduct availability testing by the minute without wasting valuable resources.
A usable and highly available website is the ultimate competitive advantage. You will need an eCommerce platform and a team of experts that can work together seamlessly to make that happen. Team Virid’s single-source eCommerce platform marketAgility 7.0 is the solution to any of your complex eCommerce challenges including website availability, custom integrations, omnichannel inventory management and so much more. If you're looking for ways to improve the customer experience, or ready to move on from an eCommerce platform that isn't a good fit, schedule a consultation today to get started.
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