If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you lose more than half of your users before they even arrive on your website. Imagine what your users would do if your website was to remain unavailable for more than 2 seconds.
That’s why a broken website simply is not an option for online businesses.
Your website represents your brand. When it breaks down, it affects not only your productivity but also your reputation. Website crashes are not uncommon, and even giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter have faced its wrath. Any website can break, but it is critical to limit the downtime if not prevent it.
Here are some of the most common reasons why websites break, so you can stay on top of them and keep them running at all costs.
From Internet Explorer to Chrome, all internet browsers often push new updates to fine-tune a product to make it the best it can be. These updates help improve customer experiences, reduce website vulnerability to hackers, viruses, and strengthen your website’s security position. Web designers develop the website keeping in mind the most current browsers. Thus, if you have not updated your browser, you can experience crashes or not view the websites in their entirety.
Organizations around the world rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to form the backbone of their presence on the Internet. In 2017, a simple typo accidentally broke the web code and created ‘The Great Amazon Web Services Outage of 2017’. If your website experiences a crash after someone works on it, it probably crashed because of a code error.
It’s every website owner’s dream to experience a traffic spike like never before. However, if your website is not ready to accommodate a spike in web traffic, you can end up losing more than you can gain. Anticipate the traffic surge and allocate your resources accordingly. Your website maintenance partner will upgrade your hosting plan to meet such needs.
Your website likely has multiple plugins, software, or PHP code for different functionalities on your website. Popular CMS solutions like WP And Magento are also always pushing out updates very frequently, causing issues. However, keep in mind that updates always have the potential to cause compatibility issues. It is critical to take the help of a website maintenance company to sort out the updates and get things back to normal.
Hackers usually target non-encrypted, unsecured websites. They can crawl into your website and leave dangerous malware in files that can impact your website’s performance, while some can cause your website to break down completely. Bots and DDoS are popular tricks used by cybercriminals to attack websites.
Unfortunately, the services of web providers that create and host web services can also go down. And if they do, your website will go down too. Most hosting providers have an entire fleet of IT teams who constantly monitor the servers. However, even they face technical problems, such as the breakdown of equipment, bad weather, etc., which can cause domain/hosting servers to malfunction. Your service provider will almost always get their servers up and running again pretty quickly, but until your provider fixes it, you just have to wait patiently.
One missed domain renewal is all it takes for your website to crash. Other issues like DDOS attacks, high DNS latency, Improper configuration of DNS records, network failures, high TTL values are a few problems associated with DNS. Your website maintenance services will keep you updated on such errors, and make the necessary changes to resolve such issues as soon as possible.
What Can I Do to Fix a Website Crash?
Most websites crash at some point. It is unavoidable. Work with your website maintenance company to get your website back up and running. Pulse’s web maintenance services take care of all your technical site maintenance, like plugin updates, theme updates, core updates, as well as monitoring for malware and hacks. After all, it’s all about the speed and efficiency with which issues are identified, reported, and, ultimately, resolved.
Here are some of the ways to fix a crashed website:
Restore from backup: You can quickly restore your WordPress site from an automatic, manual, or system-generated backup. With different backup options, you can restore your site at any time with a single click.
Fix plugins by manual code adjustment: Since plugins are, in fact, one of the leading causes of crashed websites, fixing them is a great place to start when trying to resolve that issue. At Pulse, our engineers work to understand the underlying problem and use manual code to adjust the broken plugins, so your website is back to normal.
Clean out viruses: If your website is attacked by malware, the first step we implement is to use a clean version of WordPress and free it from all plugins. Then we scan all files using multiple plugins like Quttera, Wordfence, Sucuri, etc. To enhance its security, we also add a firewall like Cloudflare to protect against DDOS attacks.