Everyone who is tasked with running a website or has someone doing that for them knows that there are many ways to make absolutely sure that the website does not crash, though sometimes it’s out of anyone’s control, says Cloudways. It is incredibly infuriating to deal with a website crash of any kind. They somehow also always happen at such an inconvenient time. If you are a newbie to having or working on a website, then you definitely should be reading this. If you are in charge of a website and it crashes, don’t beat yourself up about it. Yours isn’t the first website to crash nor will it be the last one ever. It happens, but here is what you should do if your website crashes.
First, has your website *actually* crashed?
You want to be absolutely sure your website has crashed before going into panic mode, says TechTarget. Make sure it’s not just a bad internet connection or something by using tools online that can check it for you. Your website can also just have been down for a few minutes but is working fine again. You don’t want to run around sending a bunch of emails to fix something that isn’t broken, so this first step is essential.
Second, safety first
As soon as you confirmed that the website has indeed crashed, the first thing you should make sure of is that there isn’t any breach of privacy. If your website handles a lot of sensitive information, you need to make sure that is in order. If there is a threat of breach, loss, or corruption of data, make sure this is fixed first. But if not, what main causes for websites to the crash are the most likely to have happened in your case? Once you figure that out, you can fix it easier.
Third, time to de-escalate
Once you understand what the problem is, you should contact everyone who is responsible to help you in these situations. These people should include IT, digital, and marketing departments. If there are others you know to contact about this, this is when you should do so.
Fourth, minimize any damage to your audience
A website crashing is terrible for the experience of a user, but luckily there are ways you can make this better for them. Instead of a boring error page, you can bring them to a landing page that gives them some information about what is going on. You can also send them to a queue and have updates sent to them in real-time. This works best if your website crashed due to too much traffic. A great way to make sure that type of website crash doesn’t happen in the future is by getting extra IPv4 address space. You can do so with Prefixbroker, where you can meet with an IP broker and connect with people who are willing to sell IPv4 addresses.
