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
You all know how important it is to have a website that is engaging and responsive to your customer’s needs. Your website is one of the best promotional tools you have at your disposal and if you don’t operate a brick-and-mortar business, it is your main contact point with your customers. However, if you don’t keep your website operating at maximum efficiency it could adversely affect your bottom line. Efficient operation means more than just avoiding downtime – operating metrics, such as page load time, are also crucial in determining the quality of the interactions your customers have with your website. Here are some of the impacts of a poorly performing website and a few suggestions as to what you can do to keep your website running smoothly.
Lower search results ranking
Search engine algorithms use both site downtime percentage and page load time when ranking websites in their user search results. If your site has frequent outages or frequently loads very slowly, it could end up on page 11 of the results. You lose the advantage of having an engaging site if potential customers can’t find you when you’re not prominently displayed in their search results.
Unhappy customers and lost sales
Website outages can be very costly. When Amazon’s site crashed for 40 minutes in August 2013, the Puget Sound Business Journal estimated the company lost $4.72 million in sales. Your company may not be as big as Amazon, but you will lose sales if your site is down for any length of time. Your customers may buy from a competitor during the outage and you may not get that customer to come back.
Slow page loads are also bad for business. PC Magazine gives this definition of the 8-second rule: “Research has indicated that if users have to wait longer than eight seconds to download a Web page, they will go elsewhere.” Your customers (and potential customers) will most likely be frustrated if your site loads slowly and will probably go elsewhere to make their purchases. Not only will you lose sales from existing customers, but you will also experience a lower conversion rate of potential customers and a lower growth rate of revenue and profit.
Mitigating website performance problems
Keep in mind that you won’t ever experience 100% website uptime – no hosting provider can (or will) give you that guarantee, so expect that your website will experience downtime at some point. Therefore, you need to be proactive to minimize the cost to your business when that eventuality occurs. Backup your site daily, and consider using a different provider to host your backups. Having backups available will help you get up and running again quickly if your site goes down. Consider using content delivery network (CDN) services to deliver cached website content during short-duration outages to reassure customers that you will be back online shortly.
StatusCake provides website monitoring services and downtime alerts that can mitigate some of your concerns. We will monitor your site and promptly notify you if your site goes down so you can quickly assess the problem and get back online. We will also check your page load time so you can work with your hosting provider to quickly rectify slow loading time and keep your customers happy. Your peace of mind is our main concern.
StatusCake Team
Share this
More from StatusCake
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
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)
6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff
James Barnes
March 11, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)
5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything
James Barnes
March 4, 2026