Table of Contents
5 Ways to Improve Website Uptime
Website uptime is an important phenomenon for potential visitors and customers. To retain existent customers and reach new people, uptime of a website must be high. Today, we explore five basic practices for improving website uptime.
What is Website Uptime?
Before focusing on the practices, we need to consider website uptime meaning. Website uptime is the duration a website remains operational and accessible to internet users without interruptions. The duration is generally stated as a percentage; if the value is high, it means that the website is accessible more. For instance, an uptime of 99.9% remarks that the site is accessible 99.9% of the time.
For positive user experience and digital reputation, each website should have a high uptime.
Every website may experience downtime at any time due to various reasons, like server connection failure, cyber attacks, and server overload. These situations are usual, but you have to take precautions against downtime possibility.
How to Check Website Uptime?
Regular website uptime monitoring is crucial because it allows website owners to detect issues quickly. Also, businesses and individuals can be sure about the performance of their sites by monitoring uptime.
Some website uptime monitoring software, like UptimeRobot, Pingdom, and StatusCake, can be used to check uptime. These tools offer real-time monitoring and alerts for detecting performance issues. You can improve user experience with the help of website uptime monitoring tools.
Practices for Increasing Uptime
After answering ‘’How to check website uptime?’’, it is time to focusing on the ways for improving uptime.
-
Use a Reliable Hosting Provider
Selecting a reliable web hosting provider is an important step for high uptime. A successful provider can offer a guaranteed uptime percentage, like 99.9% or higher. Also, the provider can avoid downtime due to hardware failures by offering proper backup systems and security measures.
If you realize that your site experiences frequent downtime, you can think about upgrading your hosting plan. At the beginning, most businesses prefer shared hosting which is an affordable option for small businesses and blogs. After websites’ traffic increases, shared hosting is not enough. When the hosting plan becomes inefficient, a dedicated server or VPS hosting plan can be chosen. Also, cloud hosting is suitable for small, mid-size, and big businesses. You should firstly find a reliable hosting provider, and then, check its every hosting plan by considering your project’s needs.
-
Utilize a Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers distributed across multiple locations worldwide. It caches websites’ content and deliver the content from servers to the users. Thanks to CDN, load times decrease, and user experience is improved. Website speed is affected by distance from the server, so using a CDN provides you with fast loading time and better website performance.
-
Large images may cause time out, so they affect website uptime negatively. Reduce Images’ Size
Large files on website pages affect uptime negatively; their download and display take a long time, and this circumstance makes websites slow. Also, files which require a lot of space might sometimes cause time out on websites. Because of this, website owners should select proper file size for not decreasing uptime.
According to The HTTP Archive, 61% of a website’s page weight depends on images. This value proves that images affect uptime crucially. Large image files generally slow down websites and increase the load servers. You can compress images and optimize their size before uploading them on your pages. For this, you can utilize different tools, like TinyPNG and ImageOptim, and improve page load times. Moreover, you can consider new image formats, such as WebP and JPegXR, for better compression.
-
Use Website Caching
Website caching is storing copies of files in a cache. With this activity, cached content can be accessed quickly. You can use website caching for storing static versions of your web pages. Via this usage, you can reduce the time it takes to load a page for your visitors. In addition to decreasing load times, you can decrease the load on your server, preventing problems during high traffic periods. In short, you can implement caching solutions, like browser caching and server-side caching, to improve customer satisfaction and your website’s performance.
-
Implement Regular Maintenance and Updates
You should consider regular maintenance and updates for a smooth website. Updating software, plugins, and security patches is critical for avoiding vulnerabilities. Also, you can schedule regular maintenance to clear cache, optimize databases, and remove unused files. With regular maintenance, you can detect potential issues on your website in a detailed way and prevent unexpected downtime.
Conclusion
High uptime brings excellent customer experience and boosted sales together. To pursue your website’s reputation, you need to monitor website uptime regularly and focus on the above practices.
At Hostingo, we hold to the importance of high uptime. You can ensure your website is always up with our top-quality infrastructure and support. Learn more about our uptime guarantee and start your journey with Hostingo today!
Website uptime is the period when a website is operational and accessible while website downtime is the period when the website is unavailable due to some issues.
Website uptime is important because it ensures that users can access the site, maintaining business operations and customer satisfaction.
Yes, website uptime often depends on the quality and reliability of web hosting services, as they provide the infrastructure that keeps the site online.