Your Uptime Matters

Your prospects and customers understand that your business does not necessarily operate 24/7. However, they also expect that they should be able to get information about your business anytime they want. Your company’s online assets need to be available all the time. It is simply expected.

Availability of many of your company’s online assets are out of your control. You do not control the availability of your Google profile, your BBB profile, Facebook, etc...However, you do have some control over your company website. You need to do all you can to make sure that your website is available anytime someone chooses to visit.

Have you ever visited a website only to see the spinning “loading” wheel and then some kind of error message? This is what you need to avoid. If users have this type of experience it damages trust in your business. There is a low tolerance for these types of experiences, and users will go somewhere else if they can not access your website.

In addition to the damaged trust created by this poor user experience, Google and other search engines are also continuously crawling the internet and judging your website by what it finds. If it detects that your site is down (or slow in responding) your rankings with them can be impacted.

Most small businesses do not host their own website, and may feel like they have little or no control over their uptime and response time. You normally rely on a hosting company to host your site. Even in the best possible conditions, most web hosts have a hard time meeting their promised 99 percent uptime. Depending on your business, seven hours of downtime can add up to thousands of dollars.

There are some things you can do to help combat downtime. You need to be sure you are using a reputable host that uses up-to-date technology. You can also work with your webmaster to be sure that your site does not have code that is causing it to be slow or unresponsive. The big question that most small businesses need help with is determining whether they actually have a problem or not.

One of the most accessible and reliable ways to stay on top of this is to use a website monitoring service. Doing this will help you keep an eye on your site's performance and uptime, and it can help you analyze performance issues.

B3 Helps

Does this sound like it's a little daunting? Not sure where to even get started in monitoring your website? Your B3 subscription takes care of it for you. Your website's uptime, spelling, and broken links are all included. Login to your B3 Account, make sure your website address is listed properly in your B3 profile, and we'll take it from there.

When B3’s monitoring service detects that your website it down you will be sent an email notifying you. Log in to your B3 Account to see how your website is performing.