You can awe the success of your website to many reasons, like quality content, proper navigation and layout, mobile-friendly design, and more. However, all of that comes later, speedy loading times and good uptime should be the primary and foremost success factors.
You already know what can cause your website to crash, like an expired domain, poor quality web hosting, DDoS attacks, etc. You may be looking for the solutions to dealing with these problems and ensuring highest possible rate of availability of your website. Well, you have come to the right place.
Now, let’s get you started!
Choose a reliable web host
Making sure your website is hosted with a reliable and reputable web host is significantly important to keep no overloaded servers and 100% operational hardware.
Though minor issues or mishaps occur at times, on the whole, a reliable hosting provider is more likely to leave no stone unturned in terms of evading and preventing downtime.
If you’re relying on a good web hosting provider, they tend to proactively inform customers about what causes the downtime issue instead of ignoring or denying it. Then they would work hard to get it fixed as soon as possible.
As a non-tech savvy with a big budget, you can also use subscribe to a managed hosting provider who releases you from core updates, theme & plugin updates, operating system setup, backups and so forth. Not only is the chance of bugs reduced but also you have more time and energy to focus on building website, creating content, and running business.
Use a CDN
Taking advantage of a content delivery network (CDN) service like MaxCDN or CloudFlare is helpful for minimizing your downtime. A CDN provider, generally speaking, enables you to use their nameservers to send traffic to your website. As such, you CDN provider is able to serve a cached version of your website to your users in event of your web host’ servers going down.
This could be extraordinarily helpful when your website comes with a more or less static version. Your comments, sign ups, form submissions and other features won’t work, obviously. But your CDN can help support a cached site with basic content for a while before your hosting provider successfully fix the downtime problem and recover your website.
Keep your website in order
Hardware or server-side problems contribute to the larger reason for website downtime, but should not the only reason. Sometimes, your website brings itself down as well.
In addition to updated scripts, themes and plugins, you need to ensure they are popular and reliable. If you come across errors like 502 or 503, you should know that your account is using more resources than it is assigned, which in turn is probably caused by a poorly coded script or plugin on your website.
Check after making changes to your website
You should be aware that any improper changes you’ve made to your website could lead to a downtime issue. Even if your upgrades or new installations go smoothly as expected, glitches can still occur and which you may don’t want your visitors to discover.
So, you’d better check your website immediately after installing a new plugin, updating WordPress, etc. If your website unfortunately shows in white screen of death, you can quickly trace and correct the problem before any real damage is done.
Of course, if you can make use of a local server or staging to test site changes before make them go live, it would be much better to avoid bad user experience.
Beef up your website’s security
Security plays an important role in website uptime. When you have put enough effort to keep a secure website, you can protect it from being accessed by hackers. Basically, reducing access points means minimizing the possibility of someone taking down your website via malware or any other malicious bit of code.
There are many security measures you can take to secure you website, such as using an SSL certificate, setting strong password, installing a firewall, or making regular backups, etc. If you are looking for more details of these measures, feel free to check out our previous article How To Secure Your WordPress Site.
It could be a disaster to experience downtime on a website. As a website owner, you’re at risk of losing customers or even revenue if your website goes down time and again. Luckily, there are some useful solutions to this potential problem. Hopefully the above suggestions can help keep your website up and running no matter what happens.
