As a business owner, your website is your showcase. It is your business’ sales floor, your brand, and more. It sells for you 24/7, and that’s why a website crashing can be so detrimental.
(Pixabay / rawpixel)
No matter how customer your website design or proactive you are, there will likely be a time that your website crashes. Knowing the reasons behind website crashes will allow you to prepare and avoid them.
Here are a few commons types of website crashes.
- Server error – Server errors usually mean that something is corrupt on your site, or your host is having a problem. When you see this error, contact your host to see if they can resolve the error or help you identify how to fix it on your end.
- Massive traffic spike – You want traffic to come to your website but when there is a sudden influx of traffic that you weren’t prepared for, your website could crash. Talk to your host about increasing your website’s resources to handle dramatic increases in traffic.
- Need for a new host – Has your website grown over the years? Your hosting plan may no longer support the size of your website and the amount of traffic you are getting. If your website crashes frequently, maybe it’s time for you to get a new hosting plan.
- Expired domain – Always keep tabs on when your domain expires. If you let it lapse, down goes your website… even if your host is still current.
- Plugins – Sometimes a third-party plugin can have a hiccup. Maybe you updated your website, and the plugin isn’t compatible with the new version. Perhaps the plugin has a vulnerability that a hacker took advantage of. If you know that a plugin is the cause of your problems, disable it and contact the plugin developer for a new version or some answers.
- Brute force attacks – Hackers aren’t always trying to steal data. Sometimes they just want to be annoying and crash a site. A brute force attack is when hackers use programs to send an excessive number of fake visitors to a website to overload it until it crashes. Again, talk to your host about how you may increase your website’s resources to minimize this vulnerability.
- Code errors – This type of problem is usually caused by someone who works directly with the website. Sometimes, all it takes is one character off in a line of code to bring a site to its knees. If you see your website returning a code error, talk to anyone that may have recently made updates to it.