This article was written by Michelle Weger.
If something went wrong on your website, would you know?
When something is wrong in your car, your check engine light comes on your dash.
There’s a reason that little light exists. (Despite how many of us tend to… ignore it.)
Continuing to drive around in your car, completely unsuspecting, could be potentially dangerous. That little light is what alerts you to call your mechanic and take action.
But what if something was wrong with your website – would you know right away? What alerts you to call your website developer and take action?
It all comes down to one important thing: putting safeguards in place to ensure you have ample warning when something goes wrong.
If your website goes down, how quickly would you be able to get it back online?
For one of our clients, even a few hours of website downtime could cost him thousands of dollars.
One Saturday, Nabil and I got a notification that his website was down. There was an issue with the hosting company. That client’s entire business is based online – if it was down, he was not earning money, period.
He did not receive a single email or social media message from customers to tell him that his website was down.
He has great customers. But even so, when they could not access his website, they simply… did something else. They assumed that whatever issue he was facing would eventually be resolved, and they moved on with their day.
At the time, he was also running thousands of dollars worth of Google and Facebook ads, directing people to his website.
Which was currently completely non-functional.
Any brand-new potential customers who clicked on those ads – who did not have the benefit yet of experiencing his exceptional product and phenomenal customer service – would be greeted by an error code.
Not a great look.
In fact, it is unlikely that they would return after such an unprofessional first impression.
And he had no idea.
But because he is a backups and security client of ours, we immediately got a notification when his site went down. We were able to contact his hosting company and resolve the issue on his behalf in less than an hour. (And if it had come to the worst-case scenario, and his website had been hacked, we were ready to restore his entire website from the recent backup we had.)
When we emailed him to let him know that we had fixed the issue, he hadn’t even been aware there was an issue at all!
That’s like your mechanic showing up at your house to change your oil before you even see the check engine light.
And even if you are on your own website every day, you aren’t likely to catch the moment your site goes down.
That’s exactly what our Security and Backups packages offer. We know the second your site goes down, and can get right to work figuring out why and getting you back online. (There are also a ton of other features, like SEO monitoring and updating plugins so you aren’t vulnerable to security issues and hackers).
