As an online barbecue business, you know that when people get a craving for the pig, you need to act fast.
But if your website goes down, you won’t just disappoint hundreds of rabid barbecue fans. You also stand to lose a serious amount of business.
Don’t believe us? Just listen to these figures.
When Amazon’s site crashed in 2013, they lost over $66,000 — per minute. In fact, for over 1/3 of online businesses, the average cost of a single hour of downtime is about $20,000.
No matter the size of your online barbecue business, you need to ensure that you’ve taken the steps to keep your website up and running and your customers satisfied.
Your goal should be 99% uptime for your site, if not higher.
Sounds great — but how do you get there? Read on to find out.
1. Beef Up Your Security
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that cybersecurity is a huge concern in today’s world. In fact, over 30,000 websites are hacked every single day.
If your online barbecue business is hacked, you don’t only have to worry about a loss of revenue while you wait to get your site back online. Sometimes, hackers will even hold your content — and saved customer data — for ransom.
To avoid revenue losses and hefty payouts to criminals, there are a few things you need to do.
First, always ensure that you run frequent updates on your site. Yes, having to wait for those updates to run is time-consuming and annoying. But it’s nothing compared to the frustration you’ll have to deal with if your site is hacked.
Frequently monitor your website traffic, or rely on a professional monitoring service to crawl through your visitor data log and check for suspicious login attempts or other activity.
Finally, always ensure that your password is as strong as possible. You might think you’ve chosen a perfect passcode, but check to make sure it’s not on this list of the most common passwords.
2. Constantly Test Your Site
You owe it to your online barbecue business — and your customers — to run as many site tests and checks as possible.
This is especially important if you’re expecting a sudden influx of traffic around a large annual sale or the holiday season. You need to make sure that your website can handle a sudden spike in traffic.
Testing your site will quickly identify bugs, weak points, and let you know how long your site can successfully run with high amounts of traffic.
Remember that when you’re testing your site, you also need to run those same tests on its mobile version.
Google’s PageSpeed Tools are incredibly helpful for running these tests.
3. Remove Heavy Elements From Your Site
Heavy elements on your website, sometimes referred to as “dynamic content” might look awesome — but they can cause your website to crash or slow your loading time to a crawl.
The same goes for web tools and plugins that tailor popups and ads to individual visitors, especially on your site’s homepage.
For example, look at this page from BillyOh.com. The website developers have found a way to advertise their discounts without relying on popups or large image files to get the job done.
The page is also free from autoplay options, and the product images are small in size. This is the kind of design you should aim for.
4. Rely On A Content Delivery Network
Everyone loves barbecue! It’s an indisputable fact, but you’re especially aware of it because you have customers in numerous parts of the country or the world.
While this is excellent for your business, it can sometimes cause problems when it comes to your website’s uptime.
If your business has expanded to new markets, then it’s time to upgrade to a content delivery network (CDN.)
In a nutshell, a CDN will create servers in many locations across the country, or, if needed, internationally. Then, when a faraway visitor heads to your site, they’ll be able to access the server that’s closest to their current location.
Plus, the more servers you have, the less likely your website is to crash due to a sudden influx of visitors.
5. Reevaluate Your Host
If your online barbecue business has suffered from several crashes lately, then it’s likely time to rethink your current host.
Whenever your site crashes, communicate with your host as soon as possible. (However, remind them that it’s their responsibility to alert you when they’re experiencing problems in the future.)
Also, if you’re currently operating on a shared server, your business may have outgrown the ability to share with others. This is because one of the other sites you’re sharing hosting space with could have a spike in traffic that could cause your website to crash.
When you’re ready, it’s best to upgrade to a dedicated server.
How Can You Grow Your Online Barbecue Business?
Thanks to this post, you now have five excellent ideas that will help you to ensure that your site continues to run smoothly as often as possible.
However, with everything else that you have to do to keep your customers satisfied, sometimes you just don’t have enough time to take the proper precautions.
That’s where we come in.
We offer several different levels of reliable website monitoring, which will check your site once every half hour or two minutes.
We work to send you alerts the moment something goes wrong. We even run our web checks from different locations across the world, so your international market isn’t ignored.
Create your account with us today to increase your site’s uptime — and the number of sales you’re able to make.
