As a business owner with a website, you will know just how many obstacles occur when you are setting up your online business. Any slip-up, and your website can become unsafe, unusable or simply crash altogether. Plus, if you love your business and don’t want to lose reliability with your customers, you want your site to be running smoothly 24/7. In today’s market, one mistake can lead to a great many customers going elsewhere. Setting up a website can also be expensive, if you hire professional web designers and invest a lot of time in the layout of the site. You don’t want things to keep going wrong.
So how can you avoid your website becoming a liability for your business? Your site is meant to be a promotional tool which helps customers access you more easily. Without proper preparation and support, though, it can turn quickly into a tool which makes your business look incompetent and unreliable to your customer base. Here are some tips to avoid your site crashing.
Measuring Footfall
Nowadays, using SEO tools, you can measure footfall to your website very easily. This will allow you to predict and prepare for any increase in traction on your site which can cause it to freeze or crash. For example, if your company offers a clearance sale, giveaway or a similar attractive deal, you can expect higher footfall than usual. You can then help your site cope with extra measures in place such as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a network which allows multiple customers at once to use your site without creating problems.
Outsourced IT Support
Even if you are a sole trader with a relatively small customer base, you should still look into outsourced IT support. Unless you have extensive training and expertise in IT operations, you will not fully appreciate how complex and difficult it can be when your site is experiencing problems.
For your customer base, your site is their connection to you. This means if your site regularly experiences problems and crashes, they will assume that you are an unreliable business to buy from – even if this is untrue. This makes it essential that your site avoids problems which will make you seem untrustworthy to your customers. Outsourcing a Managed IT provider will leave your IT in the hands of experts who can resolve any problems with ease and professionalism. This means you will never be left confused and panicked when you can’t figure out what is going wrong with your IT.
Daily Backups
To avoid losing information and records, ensure your database backs up your site files and updates every day. This will prevent a crash from causing expensive errors in your operations when your files are lost. Make sure you set up this daily backup system before you begin trading on your site; this will help you stay secure from the very beginning.