Tired of downtime? Download our guide to the right to get tools to keep your site live!

You are investing a substantial amount in your digital presence. You’ve posted your services, photographs of your work, and reviews from happy customers. Your website is like the tireless superstar on your sales team, spreading all of the information a potential customer would need to buy from you.

But what happens when your site goes down?

  • Most importantly, you lose all sales your website would generate.
  • Your paid search traffic is directed to error pages, but you still pay for clicks.
  • Users may report to Yelp that you are out of business – which is hard to reverse.
  • If your site stays down for more than 24 hours, Google may report that you are out of business – Also hard to recover from.

Essentially, your website being live and viewable to the world is the bedrock of your marketing effort.

But, what’s a good benchmark for how often a site should be down? Server maintenance is a requirement, and power outages happen. Well, we can help with that question. As remodelers, you know off the cuff how long a good window should last. As digital marketing experts, we know how often a good website should go down.

Essentially, never.

The industry standard for website uptime is that your website “should” be up 99% of the time. Breaking that down as hours per year, that means that your site should be down less than 88 hours per year. 

Remember that your website is your sales superstar – do you want your star salesperson on vacation for 2 working weeks a year? OF COURSE NOT! A live website 99% of the time is the absolute bare minimum.

To figure out how often your site is down, there are a handful of tools to help you. Most tools can even send you an email or text message if your site goes down! Software like this pings your website on a regular basis, and counts how often it is down as an uptime percentage. Download our guide below to read which tools work best, including several free options!

For your own business site, if you have a professional tech team, your site should just about never be down. If your website has been down more than once in recent memory, you have a problem. For instance, remodeler websites hosted by Spectrum do not have downtime – we host sites in duplicate, in different time zones in case of local power outages. If our Chicago office simply ceased to exist, our client sites would remain up. With cloud technology making the advances it has, this is cheap insurance to keep your star salesperson on the clock, no matter what.