Reducing Downtime for Your WordPress Website: Tips and Tricks
Downtime can have disastrous consequences for your WordPress website. When visitors click through to your site, they expect to be able to use it. If it is offline, your audience will quickly lose patience and may never return. In this article, we will discuss how downtime can negatively affect your WordPress website and how you can monitor it to see if it’s a problem. We will also look at how you can improve your uptime to make your site as successful as possible.
Why Downtime is Bad for Your WordPress Website
Downtime can cost you returning visitors, new leads, potential clients, and sales. It can also mean that your site loses credibility with your audience and within your industry. A site that has problems with downtime portrays an image of unprofessionalism and would not be a first choice for paying clients. The other major reason that you don’t want a problem with downtime is that Google and other search engines don’t like it. Regular downtime will quickly start to affect your ranking in their results pages, resulting in less traffic.
Use a Monitoring Solution to Track Downtime
The first thing you need to know when considering how to reduce your WordPress website’s downtime is just how much your site is affected by this issue. One way to do this is to use a monitoring solution to see if, and when, your site is going offline. Here are a few options for measuring your WordPress website’s downtime:
Jetpack: Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that has multiple uses and is well worth installing on your site. One important part of Jetpack is its module Monitor, which can help track downtime for you. Monitor will check your site every 5 minutes to see if it is online. If something goes wrong, Jetpack will email you to let you know your site is down, and then again once it is back up and running. This will give you an accurate picture of when your site is offline and how long for each time.
Pingdom: Pingdom is a popular premium solution for those wanting a little bit more information about their site’s performance. Pingdom provides uptime monitoring, using 60+ probe servers from all over the world to test your website up to every minute. If something breaks, it immediately alerts you. More impressively, Pingdom offers analytics to help you understand the root cause of each downtime issue. This means you can fix the problem and prevent it from recurring, resulting in more uptime long term. Plus, with the Pingdom Real User Monitoring plugin, you can easily integrate Pingdom tools with your WordPress installation.
Choose a Web Host With a Good Reputation
Once you have an idea of how often your site is suffering from downtime, you need to start addressing the causes. Your web hosting could well be one of the problems, so it is important that you entrust your site to a professional hosting company that won’t let you down. Here are some options:
WP Engine: WP Engine is our top pick for a reliable host. They offer fully managed WordPress hosting plans that come with great technical support, free staging sites, powerful servers, and an impressive 99.95% uptime guarantee. WP Engine allows for up to 0.05% of your server time each month for maintenance (and they even offer a credit of 5% of your monthly charge for each hour your site is down beyond). This is to keep your servers running fast and safe. WP Engine is great at their job, and if they do anticipate a server or datacenter being down for a prolonged period, they’re proactive and will transfer your sites over to a new server to keep you up and running.
SiteGround: SiteGround is another feature-rich managed hosting service. This one, however, is at the more affordable end of the scale and therefore more accessible to everyone from bloggers to small businesses and beyond. SiteGround offers a selection of hosting options, including web, cloud, and dedicated hosting. It is quick and easy to set up and uses the most recent technologies in the hosting field. Most importantly, however, SiteGround is renowned for its uptime. SiteGround boasts that its uptime is currently at 99.99%, a record that any hosting company would be proud of.
Pagely: Pagely is a high-end hosting solution, aimed at large sites and big businesses. Offering fully managed WordPress-specific hosting in the Amazon cloud, Pagely prides itself on being extremely scalable. Therefore it is a popular option for heavyweight brands with increasing traffic needs. One of the main reasons that Pagely is so popular is that it offers 100% uptime (although it’s up to your good judgment whether or not you want to believe this 100% uptime guarantee). This means you never have to worry about your hosting service letting you down.
Keep Your Site’s Security Up to Date
One of the main ways your uptime can be affected is by security breaches. Issues with security can range from irritating viruses to your whole site being hacked, all of which can increase your site’s downtime rate dramatically. There are many ways of improving the security on your WordPress site. At the most basic level, you should regularly change your passwords, update WordPress themes and plugins, and perform daily malware scans. However, investing in a WordPress security plugin is one of the best ways to keep your site safe and your downtime at a minimum.
Wordfence Security: The WordPress Wordfence Security plugin provides free protection for your site against hackers and malware. Its Web Application Firewall prevents problems before they happen, and the Wordfence Scan will instantly alert you in the event your site is compromised. There is also a premium version of this plugin, incorporating a range of extra high-tech security technologies, like real-time threat defense. Free or premium, Wordfence Security is a great plugin to install if you want to keep your site safe and online.
VaultPress: VaultPress is a premium security and backup solution for WordPress sites. This powerful feature-rich plugin will not only protect your site from all security issues big and small but it also offers protection if the worst was to happen. VaultPress enables you to backup your site and lets you restore it quickly and easily. Not only will you always have a workable copy of your site, but your uptime should never be seriously impacted.
Maintenance and Optimization
As well as implementing a robust backup and restore process, it’s important to carry out regular optimization and maintenance of your WordPress website, including its database. You can find out more about how to keep your website running smoothly in our guide to optimizing the WordPress database and our beginner’s guide to WordPress website maintenance. And if this all sounds like too much work, then you could always enlist the services of a professional WordPress support service and let them take care of reducing your WordPress website’s downtime.
Final Thoughts
By choosing a professional web hosting service, monitoring your downtime, and keeping on top of your site’s security and maintenance tasks, you should be able to maximize your site’s uptime. This should result in better rankings in the search engines, happier visitors, and ultimately a more successful and better-performing website. If your website suffers from downtime, invest in quality hosting, use monitoring solutions, keep your site secure, and perform regular maintenance and optimization tasks.
