The rising consumers’ demands are seeking for better user experiences and it has become imperative for businesses to look for the thoroughness in their website’s user experience. Your website’s performance is an important aspect that impacts the user experience, and if your website is down then your brand and your business will also be down.
Every big brand in their journey of becoming big might have experienced a fair share of website downs at least once. The below description will manifest what kind of impact Brands and Businesses faced recently due to website outage.
Let us have a look at the recent website outages that impacted Brands and Businesses
During the last month, on May 25th, a Vancouver, Canada born billion-dollar retailer Lululemon had seen a glitch in their business because of their website outage that didn’t last more than a day but its impact as much as 17% of their online sales revenue. If that website outage would have lasted for three days, then the company might have lost sales worth of approximately $425,000.
Even the world’s largest and most funded bitcoin exchanges Coinbase was not exceptional against website outages. Because of almost 50% increase in market cap of digital currencies, which value of $91 billion in the third week of May, the most popular platform where people buy crypto currency – canvas has experienced abrupt increment of traffic and it made Coinbase.com unavailable for a few hours which implied deposit/withdraw delays.
The most recent one – on 7th June, shoppers at online retail giant Amazon website have been greeted by an image of a dog with a message “Sorry something went wrong on our end” instead of visiting product pages. It’s rare for the world’s online retailer Amazon who calls it as Technology Company and not as a retailer to have a website outage.
Though the short-lived outage happened in the middle of the day, that was Wednesday, for only a couple of hours, it would definitely have impacted on their business as they averaged their sales in 2016 to be more than $151,000 per minute in North America.
Being Proactive against Reasons that cause your website to go down or to experience an outage
In the digital world, websites can go down or experience an outage, but the question arises is “are you proactive against such outages?” Different variety of reasons, alone or together contribute to a website outage but becoming proactive against such reasons empowers you to mitigate an outage.
Take note of the two “S” – Scaling and Stability
Infrastructure, on which your website holds, should be able to scale otherwise it may end up having poor stability; which will impact your website performance when there is a minimum and maximum load variance. Though your website is optimized for better performance and your infrastructure cannot scale, there is an absolute possibility of having an outage for your website.
Coping up with Traffic Spikes
Enticing discounts or deals on your E-Commerce website may catch the eyeballs of people and your website can have a dramatic increase in traffic. If your website is not well optimized or is not prepared for traffic spikes, then your website can crash and also your brand and business.
It becomes necessary to consider the previous site traffic figures to anticipate high traffic dates beforehand for a stable user experience. Spike performance testing with benchmarked load and going beyond the benchmarked load makes you become proactive for spike traffic.
Balancing the load with Load Balancer
Bringing performance testing early help organizations could deliver high performing application and as the time passes performance testing can become expensive to incorporate changes. Moreover, an effective load balancing can do wonders in addition.
It will divide the loads from various users onto the hidden systems in impartial way. However, reconfigurations could rise errors. So, it is must to ensure that the applied servers gain load evenly for delivering maximum capacity to the users.
A vigilant eye on your communication with customers can save your brand
When you become proactive, website outage will become a very rare thing, but in the digital world the digital fact is websites go down; in case of an outage, communication can prove to be a key to maintain a good customer and service provider relationship and it becomes the vital aspect of your brand.
There should be transparency between your customer and you. You should sympathetically explain the reason behind an outage to retain the trust of the customer. If possible, you should give the estimated time for taking the business to as usual.
With the plethora of immediate customer services, every user looks for accessing the services according to their needs and choices. Learning from the outage which your business suffered could ensure better services in the future by keeping in mind the failures.
Also Read: Understanding User Experience of Mobile App to Flourish your Business
(Disclaimer: This is a guest post submitted on Techstory by the mentioned authors. All the contents and images in the article have been provided to Techstory by the authors of the article. Techstory is not responsible or liable for any content in this article.)
About The Author:
Venkatesh Akula, CEO of ClicQA, always had the fascination for technology and the way it has been revolutionizing the world.
Soon when he started his career 20 years ago, he has learnt the fact that technology not just simplifies people’s jobs but it also solves problems that people have.
