The word downtime can strike fear in the heart of just about every entrepreneur. The thing with downtime is that it can cost even a small business a few thousand dollars – it can mean losing customers, gaining a bad reputation, losing data, and struggling with other issues that will cost you both now and in the long run.
These days, you don’t even have to be suffering from complete downtime to lose money and gain a bad reputation. Many business owners consider a slow site to be down time. How frustrating is it when you’re trying to browse a site, only for it to fail to load, or take longer than a few seconds with each click? This can be especially bad if you’re not properly prepared for a launch of a new product, or a big event like Black Friday. A slow page load time of just 1 second can cost Amazon.com $1.6 billion each year. Mull that over for a second!
Below, we’ll discuss how you can avoid downtime in 2019. Take a look and you could save a fortune!
Eradicate Slow Load Times
As we mentioned in the intro, slow load times can cause all kinds of problems for your business. You’ll lose customers, risk your business reputation, and undoubtedly lose a lot of money. Here are 20 ways to speed up your website and improve conversions this year.
Put Your Trust In The Experts
The fact is, if you were to experience downtime, you’d probably be at a loss and not know what to do. You’d frantically search the web or try to find a team to help you, and in some cases, you will have probably already lost a lot of money. By finding a disaster recovery team in advance and looking into other experts who can help you to stay up and running, you’ll have a peace of mind and keep downtime to an absolute minimum.
Develop A Plan
Having a plan when you’re in the midst of downtime or at the cusp of it will help you to no end. Make sure you have a team of people dedicated to coming up with a solution, so that you don’t have to mess around in a real emergency.
Maintain Your Hardware
If you don’t maintain your hardware, you can expect it to affect your business at some stage. As network systems increasingly fly up into the cloud, it is easy to forget that hardware and cabling still drive the functionality for many systems. If you have on-site hardware or cabling, check for wear, tear, and firmware updates regularly. Alternatively, you could hire professionals to take care of this for you so it’s not something that should distract you.
Keep Viruses and Human Error At Bay
Both viruses and human error can have a catastrophic effect if you haven’t come up with a plan for them. Staying on top of your antivirus software is essential, as is making sure everybody is on the same page in the workplace so mistakes are kept to a minimum.
