Do You Want to Improve Your Website Uptime?

A fast website with zero downtime has become one of the essential keys for an online business success. Though your website may be down due to some genuine reason, it affects the revenue, reputation, search visibility and finally your online business. Apart from this, your website also signifies your brand and a small downtime during peak times may adversely affect your brand name too.


Uptime is actually the time or percentage for which your site is up and running. There’s no 100% uptime provided by any hosting provider. But if you are hosting your website with a quality hosting service, your site will be down for just 1-2 hours in 30 days. Otherwise the downtime issue will be as much as 10 hours in 30 days.


How does it feel when you reach the offline clothing store and find it closed? It feels awful when you reach the offline clothing store and find it closed. The same is the case when the visitors visit your non-operational website.  You not only lose your credibility, but give access to competitors for grabbing your prospects.


Here are 8 best practices for improving your website uptime –


1.    Check for the Ideal Web Hosting Platform
The web hosting plan on which your website is hosted is one of the basic aspects for uptime. Suppose there are frequent downtimes on your website, you need to check your web hosting plan and if it is offering the essential resources. Upgrading your web hosting plan or switching to another one would be the two options. If you are a start-up shared hosting will be best for you. But as the traffic increases and your website slows down then you need to opt for a server upgrade like VPS for speeding your website.


2.    Have a Backup Plan
Though it won’t be likely, that your host would be down for extended duration, but you need to be prepared with a backup plan. Simply don’t depend on any chance since it will cost you high. You need to have hosting in place with a backup of your site saved on the backup of   host's server.


3.    Compress the Image Size
Optimizing your front-end is very important to improve your website performance and complete user experience. One of the places to start is with adding images to website which is loved by all. But do you know they use up a lot of space and resources which leads to website downtime. As per the stats by the HTTP Archive, 61 percent of a website’s page weight on a desktop is utilized by images. You need to ensure that your image size is appropriate. WebP and JPeg XR are two new image formats that can help reduce weight by 20 to 50 percent without harming the quality.


4.    Go for a CDN
CDN or content delivery network is a network through which the static files of any website like images, CSS and JavaScript are distributed to web servers near to user’s physical location. Shorter the distance, faster the loading time and ultimately better the performance.  The next benefit is that there is a reduced risk of downtime disruptions due to traffic volumes. So, in whatever direction you look at CDN, it is a win-win for uptime.


5.    Compress JavaScript Files & Load Asynchronously
When you compress your JavaScript files, the extra space will be removed due to shrinking of file size, leading to quick load time. You can also asynchronously load any of your third party JavaScripts. Websites are highly integrated with third party content like chat features, social media, information feeds and many more. Therefore, if async is loaded in the event of third-party crash, your page won’t be stable and try to load that resource which means, async loading too helps in speedy page loads.


6.    Improve DNS
DNS or Domain Name System is a service that translates domain names into IP addresses. It’s being overlooked, as it’s an attribute of your website. But you need to give importance to DNS, as, if it goes down, your site won’t be loading properly. Checking with the host about upgrading from standard to premium DNS services would be worth for ensuring an automatic failover to other servers on the network if the closet server goes down.


7.    Build Redundancy into Your Website
Investing in a DDoS mitigation platform is another step that guarantees that your website’s uptime will be maintained continuously. You can optimize and scale up your infrastructure with this service if there’s a DDoS attack. It redirects your web traffic to the platform server farms so that your site is running yet being under attack.


8.    Inform About Scheduled Downtime Early
There’s need for scheduled maintenances once your site becomes bigger and more sophisticated. You need to post on your website the exact duration of maintenance when your site will be down so that your customers will be ready in advance. This is a simple courtesy which your customers will accept.


Hope these tips will help you to improve your website uptime so that it always keeps on performing well with less downtime.
 

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