The top 5 root causes of website downtime

We get asked ALOT about the cause of website downtime, especially if it happens regularly. The answer is downtime can be caused by many different things depending on the size and set up of your website. Luckily with StatusCake, we can help you identify what has caused your downtime and what needs to be done to fix it! 

Here’s just a few reasons why your website could go down: 

Here are some reasons why you might have an outage:

•Network device faults 

• Device configuration updates/developments 

• Human error in the backend 

• Network congestion 

• Power outages 

• Server hardware failure 

• Security threats/attacks 

• Failed software patches

Server issues

We find that one of the most regular reasons for website downtime is problems with a customer’s server. Server issues are common and can easily go unnoticed until they cause the infamous downtime. But with our server monitoring tool, you can set alerts for when your server is exceeding its thresholds for disk, RAM, CPU usage so you can avoid this.

Surge of traffic

We’ve found that a lot of people don’t know that a surge in traffic to their website can also cause downtime, whether it’s partial downtime on a singular page like a payment page or full downtime meaning the entire website. 

A classic example of this happening is on Black Friday; many more websites experience downtime during this period than at any other time in the year purely because of the extra amount of traffic hitting their site which puts too much pressure on it.

Network issues 

This is one of the leading causes of downtime and can cause even the world’s biggest websites to go down.

It is estimated that businesses lose 60 million hours a year due to website downtime caused by network outages. According to BMC Blogs, 92% of companies they surveyed who had experienced downtime reported financial losses from outages. This is something that StatusCake tries to drill into our customers; downtime really does cause a loss in revenue, as well as reputation and you truly can’t put a price on that.

Releases, updates or general changes to your website

If you make any big  changes to your website, maybe you update the WordPress version you’re on for example, this can easily cause website downtime. Even simple things like removing plugins or 3rd party integrations you have can have a big impact that can end with partial or full downtime. The way around this is to always do back ups of your website before any updates, and to test/research how any changes could potentially negatively affect your site beforehand.

Third party apps

The majority of websites out there are using third party apps for a multitude of different things on their website. From payment applications to cloud applications, there’s always something extra running in the background which has the capability of causing website downtime. We’ve seen this happen plenty of times and the only way to ensure you’re on top of it is to use our uptime monitoring solution which will alert you within 30 seconds if your website has gone down!