Website Crashes: The True Cost for Transport Companies

As of 2017, approximately 55% of small businesses have a website.

Transport companies rely on their websites to boost credibility and maximize their opportunities. Websites also enable them to provide higher quality customer service.

However, as the role of websites expand, so do the risks associated with downtime. Website crashes can now spell disaster for businesses across all industries. On average, it costs a company anywhere from $1 to more than $100,000  every minute a website is down.

Read on to learn about a few specific ways website crashes can impact your business.

The Immediate Effects of Crashes

Unlike planned downtime, website crashes are often completely unexpected. As a result, if nobody is monitoring your site, you might not realize it’s down for quite a while.

However, top moving companies attract many of their leads through their websites. For example, when customers compare movers quotes, they often visit several sites in one sitting. Most transport companies simply cannot afford to miss out on this type of online traffic.

Due to an abundance of options, most customers won’t wait for your site to come back online. Since they don’t know why your site is down, they’ll just consider other options.

Keep in mind that a crash also affects employees who rely on your website. In this case, a crash can halt business until you figure out how to resolve the situation.

Long-Term Effects on Customer Satisfaction

You’ll definitely notice an immediate impact from downtime. However, crashes also impact the long-term profitability of your brand.

Reliability is one of the many components of the customer experience. An unreliable company will steadily lose business over time.

Prolonged downtime indicates unreliability. Therefore, customers expect you to have a website downtime strategy in place so you can respond quickly.

But you should also consider the importance online reviews for local businesses. Nearly 9 out 10 consumers trust online reviews as much as peer recommendations. If you experience a crash that impacts customer service, expect negative reviews.

Negative reviews end up harming local SEO rankings as well. When someone searches for a keyword on Google, the top 3 businesses from Google maps pop up. Having bad local reviews will prevent you from getting a spot in these rankings.

Do Crashes Affect Search Engine Rankings?

In the past, many webmasters used to fear downtime because they knew a crash could harm SERP rankings. Back then, Google’s bot would only crawl every website about once per month. So, if your site went down during that time, you faced a stiff penalty.

Thankfully, Google now crawls your site more regularly. As a result, minor website crashes won’t put a dent in your SERP rankings.

However, extended periods of downtime can still impact your ranking. Therefore, you need to take necessary steps to ensure you’re prepared to deal with a serious crash.

Minimizing the Impact of Website Crashes

To reduce the impact of a crash, create backups of your database as often as possible. Invest in a DNS backup service if you can as well.

As soon as a crash occurs, inform all your users via social media. Just remember that the faster you detect downtime, the faster you can respond.

If you want to keep tabs on the status of your site, feel free to contact us to see how we can help. You can also start by comparing our website monitoring plans.