Picture this: Your big publicity moment is finally here. You launched your new product and spread the word through email blasts, interviews, and press releases. Your phone has been ringing off the hook. This injection of attention is exactly what your business needs!
Until you get the one call (or email) every business owner fears: Your website is blocked and users can’t access it.
The good news is that you’re not the first business this has happened to (looking at you, Healthcare.gov…) and you certainly won’t be the last.
But the bad news is that you are losing business. Fast.
If your website design is solid and based on a robust server, you usually shouldn’t have to think about its reliability. However, after a big PR push or a lot of attention, increased volume can wreak havoc on server setups that are geared towards a site with much less traffic.
There’s never a 100% guarantee that your website will stay up and running (there’s no way to predict natural disasters like floods and tornadoes that can bring down a server hub), but there are a few key things you can do to your site design web and structure to give your best chance to ensure that your site is as stable as possible.
- To be prepared. Set up a schedule for testing and simulation well in advance of your big product launch. Use a temporary team for testing if necessary. Use load testing tools to simulate a jump in incoming web traffic. This will help you find the places that load the slowest so you can optimize them before your big day.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN). CDNs are cloud-based data services that automatically scale to optimize delivery of all types of content, from basic websites to data-intensive things like software and videos. Reliability is king, which is why some big names like Amazon, CDNetworks, and Windows Azure joined the game. Whichever you choose, be sure to set it up and start testing at least four weeks after your expected traffic spike.
- Keep daily backup copies of website files, including all databases that are used. If the site fails, having a recent backup will ensure that the content on the site remains up to date.
- Maintain all website software such as content management systems, shopping carts, message boards, etc. up to date with their latest versions. Sometimes bugs or security holes are found in older versions that can cause a website to crash or work unexpectedly.
- Do a basic check on your server. Contact your webmaster (or look for yourself) and ask them to make sure you don’t have basic data limits in place with your website host. Many web hosts impose blanket data caps that limit the ability to transfer data to and from a website. While this would not normally present a problem for regular use, sites that expect to receive a lot of traffic should manually request the removal of the caps. This may require some additional expense, but it will be worth it to ensure your user experience is seamless.
Now, let’s say you went through the steps above and thought you were clean, only to get the news that your site couldn’t handle the influx of clicks, got overloaded, and suddenly crashed. You need some damage control, pronto. This is what you should do:
- Do not panic. See above about yours not being the first or last website to experience an outage. These things happen. It’s just part of doing business.
- Do not hide. Work as quickly as possible to fix the problem, while sending a message to all your key audiences to let them know that your site is so popular that it crashed due to overwhelming demand.
- Contact the web hosting company and learn more about their uptime policies and guarantees. They may offer credits towards your hosting fee if the site goes down.
- Use other outlets to communicate with your customers and take responsibility for the interruption. Post an apology on your company’s Facebook page. Send an email to your current mailing list. Do your best to let your customers know that you understand their frustrations and that your business is working hard to resolve the outage.
If you’re not sure how to go about this process of integrating your product, promotions, press, and pre-testing, there are many website design companies that can educate you on the basics and help you set up a solution that’s right for your business.