The Perils of an Unsupervised Website
Recently we had a business owner reach out to us because the number of phone calls they were used to receiving suddenly took a nose dive. It was something they were aware of, but it took them a long time to actually do something about it. Since they never set up analytic tracking on their website, they were unaware of the cause and blamed the lack of business on other things, such as their marketing and customer service.
They then decided to do a Google search for their business and to their horror, nothing showed up! For many years, they enjoyed good search rankings and perhaps took it a bit for granted. Now that their focus was on the subject, they were looking for answers and solutions.
After a Website Audit
We took on the case and began monitoring the website to find deficiencies. From the outside, everything seemed fine. The website was there, it was running and everything seemed to work.
We then began monitoring the site for a period of 10 days, checking for any kind of activity. By doing so, we discovered that the website would “blackout” every few hours or so, but very consistently. As an example, the website would crash (go offline). It would go down for about 15 minutes, then it would go back up again. After we pulled our reports, we were surprised to find out that the website would crash, and come back on, about 30 times a day!
This kind of problem is hard to detect, because at any given time, you can visit the website and see that it was working. But when you weren’t on the website, it would be easy to miss that the site would go offline, then back online, multiple times a day.
The Website Stopped Ranking on Google
With so much disruption, it was no wonder that Google eventually caught on, and decided not to list the website into their search results. After all, Google only wants to show the best websites to their searchers. If a website is flawed, or is causing errors, they leave it up to you to fix it, but in the meantime, they will blacklist you until you figure it out.
The Problem Was the Hosting
We reached out to the website hosting company and found out that their servers were having problems which they thought they resolved, but apparently forgot about our client. After some time, they were able to resolve all the issues, and the site was no longer having disruptions.
The Client Had No Idea
If you are not monitoring your website, things like this can happen to you. Your website could be down for a few days, and you may not even know it’s happening. We were eventually able to get the website back to good ranking positions on Google searches, but a good lesson was learned.
We Can Monitor Your Website 24 Hours a Day
There are tools out there that help monitor your website. But even if you discover that your website is down, you most likely wouldn’t know what to do about. At Webstuffguy, we can take over the burden of making sure your website is always running at 100%. We offer monthly maintenance packages that include online monitoring, as well as upkeeping your website with plug-in updates and much more.