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
There are many reasons why websites go down. Your server may become overloaded, or you could have an equipment malfunction. You might experience data center problems, or you might have forgotten to renew your domain name registration. Sometimes your site goes down because of issues connected to scheduled maintenance, or you could be the victim of a hacker. Regardless of the cause, you need to resolve the problem quickly, as downtime can have a negative impact on your business. Here are several of them.
You will receive a lower search engine rank
If your site is inaccessible, search engines will notice. If this is only an occasional occurrence, the consequences aren’t very severe. However, if downtime happens frequently, you will receive a lower ranking in search engine results.
User experience (UX) will suffer
It doesn’t matter how well designed your site is, how riveting your content is, or how attractive your promotions are. If your site is down often or loads very slowly, all the effort you have spent developing an exceptional website will have been for nothing. Visitors will not wait for a slow site to load or return to try to access your site if they find that it is down repeatedly. They will turn to your competitors, and you may have lost that customer for good.
Your brand will lose credibility
Visitors will associate a poorly performing website with poor performance in delivering your goods or services, and your brand will suffer. You could lose your credibility and get a poor reputation.
A recent survey conducted by Wirehive confirmed this point. Wirehive surveyed 1,000 UK consumers in January 2017. Of those surveyed, 68% said that would have a negative impression of a brand if its site were down when they tried to access it, and 57% said they would not buy from a brand that experienced excessive downtime. In addition, 45% of the respondents stated that they were unable to access a site from which they wished to make a purchase within the past week, and 55% of those surveyed said they were unable to access a site to check out a product or service during the past week.
Robert Belgrave, CEO at Wirehive, added: “It’s easy to assume that enjoying an online browsing session or checking out at an e-commerce platform will be plain sailing. This report has highlighted how a broken online journey can ruin your brand’s reputation and, worse still, dent your sales … get it right and your customers will have a satisfying experience.”
You will lose profits
Keep in mind that your website is the way you communicate with your customers, and every minute of downtime translates into a lost opportunity to make a good impression and make a sale. The impact of even a small amount of downtime can be significant. Market research firm Statista estimates that e-commerce revenues in the UK will total £440,772bn over the next five years. Even a downtime of only 0.1% would result in a revenue loss of £440bn over that period.
Downtime can be costly, so consider using a website monitoring service to notify you if your site goes down so you can take prompt corrective action.
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