Downtime
Downtime is usually the worst thing that can happen to any website, blog or webshop at all. Imagine the situation that users find your organic listing in any search engine. They click on it and… nothing happens because your server is litteraly down.
Nowadays hosting providers usually promise you an uptime of at least 99%. This still leads to a downtime of 3.65 days every single year (at least I’d say from my experience) your website won’t be available. Does that sound much to you?
How and why downtime harms your SEO performance
First of all, I’d like to mention the obvious but not so obvious fact:
Bad User Signals
Taking the given situation above, the users will most likely bounce directly back to their search origin if they are not able to reach your website. This leads to one important factor for SEO: the bounce rate. In case it’s getting too high, it has a negative effect on the pages ranking. But in the end it will also affect the sites ranking over time.
You are actually loosing money
Imagine the situation that you are spending money on Online Advertising. No matter which platform it is, you will always loose money on the one hand by potential customers not being able to buy from your website. You will also loose money due to the fact that you are sending paid traffic to your website (which has a certain CPC) and the users are coming to… nowhere.
How to monitor the downtime of your server or webhoster
There are two solutions for you – one paid solution and one for free.
- Pingdom (www.pingdom.com)
- Statuscake (www.statuscake.com)
Pingdom is the tool to go for if you need it in an profession context. For example if I am taking care about a client I always hook them up on Pingdom, because they are paying me for monitoring anyway. And I need to have a professional solution for that at hand.
This tool checks your page once per minute and keeps you updated in case the server can’t be reached.
Statuscake however is good to be used for any personal projects. It’s for free (and will ever be free). They are checking the downtime of your website every 5 minutes and keep you updated about it as well.