The web hosting company 1&1 asked 1,600 UK consumers (via survey company Tickbox.net) about their reactions to slow or broken websites, with some very interesting results. For example, nine out of ten people would switch to a competitor’s website if a company’s website fails to load.
The survey results also show that consumers are generally unwilling to report errors to the website owners.
Worryingly for UK companies, upon finding an error message on a business’ website, some 63 per cent of consumers would automatically source another website, with only 4 per cent willing to report the error to the business in question.
That means your website could be down or have problems for a long time before you finally find out. This is just another reason why uptime monitoring is so important and why we created Pingdom in the first place.
The team behind Pingdom originally came from the web hosting industry, so we have plenty of insights into the various issues facing both hosting companies and the websites they host. Making money is great, but we really like the idea that we are actually helping both people and companies to not have to rely on their visitors to work as alarm bells for when their website isn’t working.
If a majority of your customers know you are having problems before you do, you are in trouble.
Further reading:
The press release from 1&1.
The importance of uptime to a startup (at Center Networks)
