The cost of dead clicks
It’s 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon, the peak period of the week for sales on your website.
Something obscure is happening: Your inbox is empty, and your phones are not ringing. A quick check of your website shows a page could not be displayed error message.
Panic!
Your web host has gone done yet again. The third time this month.
For some businesses, this is an encounter they can afford, but when your business relies so heavily on the Internet for sales leads, not to mention other operational functions of the business, you can’t afford a minute of downtime.
The impact of having your web host go down is not only costing you from leads that are unable to convert, there is an immeasurable non-financial impact of damage to your reputation for having your site down all the time, and let’s not forget the cost of a dead click.
If you have a google adwords or yahoo search marketing account for online advertising, you’re paying each and every time someone clicks on one of your ads.
If you’re running a new campaign or product launch and have allocated a large budget to online marketing, and your website is offline whilst countless number of potential customers are clicking on your link only to find your website is down, you’ve just wasted a lot of money and lost a lot of sales.
Here are a few tips from Search King few tips to minimise the potential for dead clicks:
- Pick a good web hosting company, and avoid cheap hosting plans
- Check the hardware specifications of the hardware you’re hosting on, make sure your hosting provider has redundant internet connections, power supply and most importantly good uptime.
- To ensure maximum uptime, ask your hosting company for an SLA, or service level agreement. This means they’re agreeing to give you a certain level of service (ie 99% uptime), and if they fail to meet this expectation, you can lean on them.
- Make sure your hosting company has upgrade options. If you start small but begin to grow, your server needs to keep pace with your traffic. Make sure if you have disk or bandwidth quotas, that they can be increased
- Keep an eye on your website,
Don’t stick around listening to the same excuses from your hosting company. Downtime costs you money, so vote with your feet and make sure you move to a quality web host.
You may also find that a standard web hosting package just isn’t enough for your very busy website, and this is when it’s time to make a decision on buying or renting your own server, but these are things you should discuss with your hosting company, do your homework, and shop around for the best options (remember, don’t always choose the cheapest!)
This article was brought to you by SearchKing.
