Planning for problems means you will be prepared to fix them fast and get back on track. This is an extremely important matter for businesses with revenue-generating sites as eventually all websites go down. You can’t be 100% sure an outage of some kind doesn’t happen, so have a plan to handle it that you can launch on a moment’s notice to minimize your losses.
Essential Website Crash Prevention Tips for 4 Common Problems
The basics of website crash prevention lie in understanding the most common reasons for the crashes and developing a managing strategy for each. A solid plan should look like this:
- Hack or a virus attack. Using top-notch security solutions and keeping all your plugins and add-ons updated is essential for keeping your website secure and safe from attacks. You also need to choose a reliable hosting provider that will implement a variety of specialized solutions to additionally secure its servers. Finally, be sure to run a few security tests on the website using services, like Cigniti. These tests will allow you to identify the weaknesses in your defenses.
- Hosting error. The only way of website crash prevention for this particular error is choosing a reliable hosting service. To do this you’ll have to study multiple reviews and comparisons that highlight the strengths and weaknesses in every provider like Bluehost vs HostGator. Choose your service package carefully as well. Pick one that has plenty of bandwidth and consider a dedicated server if your website is big or growing rapidly. Only work with hosting services that have SSD servers with high RAM as they are faster and more reliable.
- Plugin/extension errors. Plugins, widgets, add-ons, and extensions allow customizing your website and making it more efficient and attractive at a low cost. However, any third-party software is a breach in your security. First of all, the plugins themselves might not be secure. To prevent this only use plugins from trusted reputable developers. The other problem is that they might clash and/or not be covered with your website security solutions properly. For this, the best website crash prevention tactic is running a few performance and security tests with all your new plugins on. Be sure to repeat it after every update. Keeping all components of your website up to date at all times is another essential requirement for making sure it stays secure.
- Code errors. These are similar to plugin errors but the problem occurs because the person doing the website maintenance made some mistake. The best prevention strategy is to only entrust this job to professionals. However, don’t exclude malicious intent and hacking attempt as possible causes before firing your web master.
What to Do If Your Website Crashes: Step-by-Step
- Use a website like this or something similar to determine whether your website is actually down.
- Contact your web host and report the problem immediately.
- Contact your web master and have them start fixing whatever they can.
- Notify your customers via an automated email message or another communication route they use most often.
Provide regular updates if the problem is taking a while. - Suspend all ads and other services that cannot function while your website is down to prevent accumulating more problems.
Timing is key to handling a website crash effectively. You do not only need to act as quickly as possible. You also need to have contact information of the IT professionals who will work on bringing your site back up on hand. In addition, messages with notifications of problems and temporary suspension of services must be pre-made so you can send them off in a few clicks. Be sure to do the same for the messages notifying your customers about the restoration of your services. You should also establish a channel of emergency communications for the customers who might have suffered some problems because of the crash.
