Whether you've been running a business for weeks, or for years, you'll more than likely have a website which you use to promote or sell your product.
It's great isn't it, like a digital version of the old Argos book where anyone, anywhere in the world can look at what you make, sell or do and potentially become your next customer.
That is until you check in on your website only to find that it's not loading! "How's anyone going to find me if I'm offline?" might be the first question you ask yourself, most likely followed by "how long has my website been down?" and then "how many orders have I missed?"
Making sure your website is available and online 24/7 might seem like a daunting task, you're busy with orders to pack, marketing to deliver, staff to manage and other priorities. You don't have the time to sit and constantly check if your website is working.
Why Do Businesses Need to Track Page Uptime?
The answer to this question is extremely simple, because if your website is offline it's not making you money. Even if you're not an e-commerce site selling directly through your website, your website plays a vital role in your brand reputation.
If your website is offline, potential customers can't become actual customers and give you their money.
Understand The Cost of Your Website being Offline
Issues like website downtime often aren't a concern until they happen, so it helps to consider the impact of downtime of revenue.
Lets take a B2C company selling through a website, on a typical day they spend £500 on Google Ads, take 5 orders an hour and have an average order value of £75 with margin of 5%.
Per hour that's £375 of revenue and £18.75 margin lost if their website is offline. Don't forget the media spend though, if that's used wisely with day parting (so the spend is only used at peak 8 hours of the day) there's £62.50 of wasted media spend.
That means a single hour without their website online would cost £81.75! It might not sound like much, but to a small business these amounts add up.
How Can I Check My Website is Online?
So how does a busy business owner or marketing team keep on top of making sure a website is always online when customers need it? Simply, you use technology to do the work for you.
This type of tech can go by a range of names, like an uptime tracker, downtime checker or website monitoring tool, but in essence they all do the same thing, check your website at regular intervals and alert you if something's wrong.
PageMarshal Checks You're Website is Online
Our own platform, PageMarshal does just that. Simply give it a web page to monitor, tell us how often you want to check the page and it'll check your page is online for you.
If we notice that your page goes offline, gets redirected or is broken, we'll automatically send an email to the list of people you tell us to contact.
