Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
If you’re a business owner or are responsible for the maintenance of a company’s web presence, you will know that website downtime can happen at the most inconvenient of times.
Unplanned downtime is never welcome. Your website is the online face of your business, and any period in which it is inaccessible to your clients and customers can damage the reputation of your brand.
However, it is also true that downtime is part and parcel of running a website, particularly one which experiences high volumes of traffic throughout the year. With that in mind, it’s crucial that you prepare as best as possible to deal with unscheduled downtime, and respond in a way which minimises any damage to your brand.
In this article, we will take a closer look at what you can do as a business to deal with unscheduled website downtime.
Set up a Downtime Page
While in some cases it might not be possible to set up a maintenance page in the event of unplanned downtime, you may be able to move quickly and set one up if a major period of unplanned downtime occurs on your website.
Maintenance pages are typically used as a temporary placeholder when a site has been taken offline for maintenance or updating. This can inform the user that what they are seeing is not an error but a temporary intermission, with normal service to be resumed shortly.
When a period of unplanned downtime occurs, a visitor to your website will typically be served an unhelpful error page. However, by acting quickly and setting up a downtime page, you can communicate with your visitors that you are aware of the issue, and reassure them that you are working to resume normal service as quickly as possible.
This is much more informative and user-friendly than a cold 404 page, which doesn’t provide the end-user with either information or reassurance.
Be Proactive on Social Media
Place yourself in the shoes of a user who visits a website which is offline. Perhaps the first thing you will do is to visit downforeveryoneorjustme.com, but eventually, most users will make their way to social media, either to vent about a negative experience or to contact a company directly.
By being proactive in your response on social media, you can communicate directly with your customer base, both in terms of public posts updating your audience on the issues the website is experiencing, and in one to one support for individuals who reach out to you directly on social.
Again, this type of proactive response to unplanned downtime helps to keep your customers and clients informed, and gives your company the chance to control the narrative until your website is back up and running again.
Make Regular Website Backups
One of the most effective ways of dealing with unscheduled website downtime is to prepare in advance for the unexpected. By making regular backups of your website you minimise the impact of any period of unscheduled downtime.
A backup is a carbon copy of your website that you can use to restore your website should it be taken offline. By frequently maintaining up to date backups of your website, you will be able to act quickly to restore it in the event of a code error or cyber attack.
You should check with your hosting provider if website backups are included in your current plan. If they aren’t, consider upgrading or moving to a provider who offers this service.
Set up Website Uptime Monitoring
When it comes to dealing with unplanned website downtime, time is very much of the essence. The quicker you can identify the cause of the downtime, the more effective your response will be in dealing with customers and clients who are unable to access your website.
The most important step you can take to ensuring you act quickly when your website goes offline is to actively monitor uptime status using a website uptime monitoring service.
By signing up for an uptime monitoring service, you can take assurance in the knowledge that you will be alerted virtually instantaneously should your website go offline. This knowledge will be invaluable in allowing you to be proactive in dealing with the issue, whether that be in restoring trust on social media, by setting up a downtime page or in quickly restoring a website backup.
StatusCake Team
Share this
More from StatusCake
Engineering
Beyond Uptime: Building a Self-Healing OpenClaw Observability Stack
3 min read The allure of OpenClaw is undeniable. You deploy a highly autonomous, self-hosted AI agent, give it access to your repositories and inboxes, and watch it reason through complex workflows while you sleep. It is the dream of the ultimate 10x developer tool realized. But as any veteran DevOps engineer will tell you: running an LLM-backed
Daniel
April 23, 2026
When AWS us-east-1 Fails, Much of the Internet Fails With It
7 min read There are cloud outages, and then there are us-east-1 outages. That distinction matters because failures in AWS’s Northern Virginia region rarely feel like ordinary regional incidents. They tend instead to expose something larger and more uncomfortable: too much of the modern internet still behaves as though one place is an acceptable concentration point for infrastructure,
James Barnes
April 15, 2026
In the Age of AI, Operational Memory Matters Most During Incidents
7 min read Artificial intelligence is making software easier to produce. That much is already obvious. Code that once took hours to scaffold can now be drafted in minutes. Boilerplate, integration logic, tests, refactors and small internal tools can be generated with startling speed. In some cases, even substantial pieces of implementation can be assembled quickly enough to
James Barnes
April 10, 2026
AI Didn’t Kill the SDLC. It Made It Harder to See
10 min read Whilst AI has compressed the visible stages of software delivery; requirements, validation, review and release discipline have not disappeared. They have been pushed into automation, runtime and governance. The real risk is not that the lifecycle is dead, but that organisations start acting as if accountability died with it. There is a now-familiar story about
James Barnes
April 2, 2026
When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering
4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,
James Barnes
March 25, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)
5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t
James Barnes
March 18, 2026