There’s no bigger turn off to customers visiting your website than the message stating: “This site is currently unavailable.” This often results in the loss of customers and revenue, especially if it’s a lengthy downtime. The only persons who benefit when your website goes offline are your competitors. We can’t have that!That’s why today we’ll be looking at some tips and tools you can use to monitor your WordPress Hosting server uptime.

You’ve already worked so hard to build and host your website, installing plugins like Yoast to improve your SEO to help customers find you to go offline.

While somethings that cause your website to experience downtime are out of your control, many aren’t. You need to learn of the necessary precautions you can take to properly protect and maintain your WordPress site.

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Why Monitor your Server Uptime?

It’s not possible to be on a constant vigil watching your computer screen to monitor your server’s uptime and downtime. There many services, tool, plugins that you can use to be the watchmen for you while you are sound asleep.

As mentioned before, you can’t prevent downtime sometimes but by monitoring when you go offline you can quickly be back online before any even notices.

You must monitor your website uptime to remove any lengthy and unnecessary downtime to avoid loss of business.

What does Website uptime mean?

A big part of your website uptime has a lot to do with the web hosting service provider you choose. If you are already using a reliable web hosting package from hosting.co.uk, you are in good hands.

For those still unclear, uptime refers to the length of time your website is up, running and accessible to all site visitors.

The best webhosting companies, like ours provide 99% uptime for their websites. Uptime is critical to your site’s success. It helps with proper monetisation, viewer-reliability and improves SEO ranking.

How Downtime affects your website

When your website experiences downtime, especially long and frequent ones, your business will suffer in a number of ways. These include your website reputation, user experience and overall bottom-line.

Frequent Downtime results in Loss in Money: This is a no-brainer, if customers cannot access your website for a long period you will inevitably suffer a loss in revenue.
Poor User Experience and negative Brand Reputation: When your website goes offline, it’s like inviting persons over for lunch but not letting them in. Even though you aren’t doing this intentionally, it will reflect poorly on your brand and you will lose potential customers.
Lower SEO Ranking: Search engines usually assume that websites that have frequent downtime are insignificant or lack consistency. This often leads to penalization for failure to maintain 24/7 or a steady enough uptime.

Tips To Monitor Your WordPress Hosting Server Uptime

Being online is very important for your business’ growth and success. This means that you have to do everything in your power to keep your website online all the time. You can’t intermittently hit refresh to see if your site is up. What you can do is use these tips, tools and plugins to monitor and maintain your WordPress Hosting Server uptime.

1. Ensure You Have Enough Server Capacity

Most persons usually choose the server capacity they think they’ll need. It’s normally isn’t enough to sustain growth. Maybe you did too. The downfall in this is, if your site grows, then you find yourself not having enough capacity. This results in downtime.

If that’s the case with you, upgrade the server capacity and bandwidth for your site.

Also, from the onset, you should get way more capacity than you think you’ll need for future traffic.

You don’t want your website brought down by traffic that you have been working on getting. Get or upgrade your server capacity to be flexible and scalable so you can benefit and not be brought down by a greater volume of visitors.

2. Use Plugins to Monitor Your Website

One of the best decisions you can make for your website is to choose a reliable hosting provider. However, that’s not enough, as your site may still experience some amount of downtime. What’s just as important is how quickly you get your website up and running.

This is where monitoring your site comes in. Several WordPress plugins can help to continually monitor and track your site’s health and status. They’ll verify that your site is responsive, check its speed and notify you should your site go offline. Some of these plugins include, Uptime Robot, Jetpack and Manage WP.

3. Use Web Caching

Using web caching is a smart way to increase your website uptime. How does this work? Well, whenever someone visits your website, their browser sends a request to your webpage. Your server will then retrieve the page, generate sidebars and widgets, process headers and footers, enable images and fonts etc. This takes time to process, even if it’s only a few milliseconds for each step. Most of the results are usually the same every time someone visits the same webpage.

Website caching will set a server to remember the final result for each visitor. That way, when the visitor returns to your webpage, the cache will show the same result without going through the complex procedures to find everything like it did the first time. Using web cache makes your website load faster and it also lowers the chances of downtime.

4. Use a CDN

A Content Delivery Network, CND creates an easy and efficient way to offload some of your website content to improve speed. What this does is store cached files on several servers geographically closer to your visitors.

It makes a significant difference in the loading speed for visitors who aren’t close to your main server. Since the distance of your server impacts your website speed, CND will fill in the gap to ensure that persons visiting your site from all over the world can experience speedy load time.

This delegating of your bandwidth capabilities to a CDN, will also result in you having more space on your main server.

5. Improve Site Security

Cyberattacks is one of the top reasons sites go offline. As such, improving the security of your servers, hosting service and website is very important.

Ensure all your passwords are strong, by using a combination of numbers, letters and alternate characters. If you use a content management system (CMS), make sure it is regularly updated. Also keep up to date all your apps, tools and plugins, since a lot of these updates contain patches to fight against recently discovered vulnerabilities.

Summing up

The whole purpose of having a website is to ensure that your business is open and accessible 24/7/365 or as close to that as possible. Your WordPress hosting server uptime is necessary for growing and retaining site traffic. If you don’t work on ensuring that you are online, you will start to lose customers to your competitors.

By using tools and following the best practices listed above, you will do your brand justice in helping to increase uptime and visitor satisfaction.