5 Factors Prove That Website Downtime Can Be Disastrous for Any Business

How does website downtime affect your business? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Website downtime can be disastrous for any business. Here are just a few ways businesses can be affected:

• Ecommerce businesses cannot make any sales. An Amazon website outage in 2018 for only 20 minutes cost the company an estimated $3.75 million in sales.
• B2B businesses. With customers in control of the buying process, they use the web for research and consume over 5 pieces of content before contacting sales. If your website is unavailable, they will think your business has closed shop.
• B2C businesses. Even if a brand doesn’t sell directly to customers online, people often use the web for research. As in the case mentioned above, customers may think your company is gone if they can’t find a website.
• Bloggers. Those who use ad networks to make money will lose profit if the ad network website goes down.
• All businesses, from mom and pop shops to the Fortune 500, often rely on some form of web-based application for data processing, transactions and more. If one of these websites in down, users are often dead in the water, unable to do anything until service is restored. This can affect a small portion of operations or the entire business.

Contributed by Sharon McElwee, Content Manager at Uptime.com