BUSINESS

Steps to follow when your website is down

At some point, every website experiences issues with downtime, from big companies like Amazon and Google to smaller businesses.

Website downtime and performance issues can happen at any time and for various reasons. Some common causes can be software issues, coding bugs, network downtime or power outages.

Regardless of the problem, here are three things that can help you or your team work-through any website issue.
  1. Have a plan - We included a step by step guide to follow when your website goes down. Being prepared for an outage will allow your site to get back online as quickly as possible.
  2. Contact list on hand - Don't wait for disasters to happen to lookup who to contact. Have your list of contacts updated and ready to go in case of an emergency. Make sure the contact list is in a shared location so your team members can quickly access the information.
  3. Track issues - Document how the issue was resolved, who resolved the issue and any lessons learned.
1
STAY
CALM
Sooner or later every website has issues. The most important thing is to remain calm, which will help you be more productive and help resolve issues quicker.
2
CONFIRM
THE ISSUE
Make sure it's not an issue with your computer or network. Go to another website, Check from your phone or ask a friend to test your site from another location
3
PAUSE YOUR
CAMPAIGNS
Save money by pausing your online marketing ads. Your ads continue to run when your site is having issues. pause your adsto save your marketing budget.
4
DESCRIBE
THE ISSUE
Write down if your website is down, loading slowly, showing error messages. Does the issue effect the whole website or only certain pages. How do you recreate the issue.
5
DETERMINE
THE CAUSE
If you can, try to pinpoint why the downtime is occuring. Programming error? DNS problem? Expired domain? Hardware related?
6
CONTACT
YOUR TEAM
Conact your team members or hosting provider to help you resolve this issue. Pass along any details that will help explain the issue.
7
RESOLVE
THE ISSUE
Awesome Job. Make sure to wrtie down how long the issue occurred for and thank the team for resolving the issue.
8
UNPAUSE
CAMPAIGNS
Don't forget to resume all your online marketing campaigns when your website issues have been resolved.
9
INCIDENT
REPORT
Track how the incident was fixed and who resolved the issue. This will allow you to share knowledge with others and help fix similar issues that occur in the future.


Conclusion

Website downtime impacts everyone at some point.

Having a game plan will go a long way in making sure that you and your team can resolve the problem as quickly as possible.