If you run a business online, it is critical that you make sure your website is always available. Research made in the United Kingdom indicates that nine out of ten people will go to a competitor if a website is unavailable. In other words, if the door to your store is locked, you are losing both sales and customers.
Not only that, you also lose that elusive element of goodwill. According to the same research, 85 percent of consumers claim that the reputation of a business is hurt by website downtime. Slow-loading websites were also cited as a common reason for consumers taking their money elsewhere.
Image: If a service run by Google can go down, so can yours.
Minimizing downtime is more important than ever
A vast majority of consumers, 85.5 percent, regularly shop online, and that’s bound to increase. The money spent on online shopping reaches new record heights every year, and for you to have a slice of that pie, you need to make sure that your face on the Internet, your website, is there when consumers want to go shopping. They will spend their money, you just have to make sure they give it to you and not your competitors.
As consumers become more Web-savvy, they also become more demanding. They expect websites to always work and load quickly, be it two in the morning or two in the afternoon. Every time you have downtime, you may be losing both present and future customers.
