STOP PRESS: How website downtime affects your brand

Website downtime happens to the best of us, even the likes of mammoth websites like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter all experience it. Luckily for these big companies, they’re so established and have such a huge customer base that downtime is unlikely to make them lose a large proportion of them. It will, however, cost them larger amounts of money for every second that their website is down. Take Amazon as a prime example. It suffered major downtime back in 2018, costing them an estimated $99 million in lost sales, and an even greater loss on share prices. 

But if you’re not as big as Amazon, how does website downtime affect your brand? 

1. Customer trust 

Trust is such a big thing when it comes to customers’ purchasing decisions online, especially since there are now so many malicious threats known to us lurking in the deep depths of the internet. That’s why the majority of us will look for signs of a trustworthy site before we willy nilly add in our personal information like our most sacred credit card details. 

Trust can take time to build, but it can be lost in just seconds. For example, if your website is down for an hour and your customers/potential customers have no idea what’s happening or why, they’re likely to draw their own conclusions about the safety of your website and move onto your competitor whose website is up and running and looking like this shiny, secure haven of a website. 

If you’re not sure if this is truly the case, ask yourself the question: would I go back to a website that has continuously gone down and willingly load my personal data into their system? 

2. Ability to deliver the product/service on offer 

With so many companies all claiming to be the “best in the business”, it’s hard to know which one can actually deliver on that promise. Once you’ve drudged through all the marketing hype, you might find what you consider to be a company that is fully able to give you the product or service that they claim. 

Then you see that their website goes down consistently. Not just for 1 minute but for hours on end. With no communication from the company as to why this keeps happening. Every time you try to access their website they either have partial or full downtime. 

Ask yourself, if you’re buying a SaaS product off of a company’s website that experiences regular website downtime, for example, would you then trust that they can deliver as good of a product as you once thought that they could? 

It’s important to remember that all websites experience downtime, but if a website is consistently down or inaccessible, it can be hugely damaging to a brand. 

3. Sending customers to your competitors 

Companies are in constant battles with their competitors, so when one of them goes down, it’s only normal that you’d swoop in and try to nab those customers looking for an alternative. But what about if they do that to you when your website goes down? 

Your brand could be the best of the bunch, but your website is essentially your shop window so if your website isn’t working to the expectations of prospective customers then there’s a big problem. In this day and age, customers don’t spend time waiting for websites to load, they’ll simply jump onto the next. The biggest thing to note? Ease of use is a key selling point when it comes to customers on your website. 

In a recent StatusCake LinkedIn survey, 98% of people said that their biggest bugbear for cruising the web is a website that won’t load or is down.

4. The curse of social media 

There’s nothing more damaging to your brand than an influx of negative comments on social media, especially in an age where things can go viral. So when your website experiences downtime for a prolonged period of time, it’s more than likely that you’ll start to get customers @’ing you on your social media platforms with complaints and questions. The result? Prospective customers see this and think to stay well clear of your brand. 

These are just a few of the ways website downtime can affect your brand. The solution? StatusCake of course. Low budget? We have a free for life product. Need a more comprehensive website monitoring solution? Book a demo! We are one of the most cost-effect uptime monitoring tools on the market but don’t take our word for it, head over to Alternative to StatusCake. 

We don’t just offer you uptime monitoring either, you’ll get page speed monitoring, server monitoring, domain monitoring, and SSL monitoring all in one product.