The 3-Step Communication Game Plan for a Site Outage (One of Our LEAST Favorite Things)

If those von Trapp Family singers from The Sound of Music collectively woke up in a really, really bad mood and decided to write a song about their least favorite things, then it’s a safe bet that not being able to connect to a website would make the list (alongside airline passengers who tilt their seat back, and clam shell plastic packaging).

Indeed, the level of rage that many people experience when their browser presents them with a “cannot connect to that website” message is enough to trigger a blood pressure monitoring app alarm on a smartwatch. It’s the equivalent of going to a store, only to find out that the door is locked. Actually, it may be worse than that, because at least there could be some therapeutic comfort in commiserating with other disappointed customers. But in the virtual world, the journey is usually solo — and so is the misery.

The bad news is that there is no way to absolutely, completely, and ultimately prevent site outages from happening. However, the good news is that companies can — actually, scratch that: they must — be proactive to mitigate the pain and suffering; both across their site visitors, and for themselves. To that end, here is a three-step communication game plan:

Step 1: Tell the story.

Without delay (not even for lunch), companies should leap into their operational digital properties — e.g. social media, email, SMS, chat, widget, etc. — and clearly describe:

• What’s going on and why the site is down.
• When the outage started.
• What is being done.
• When the outage is likely to end based on all available information and best estimates.
• Options and workarounds (if they exist).
• Relevant policy or process changes (e.g. “due to this unforeseen event we are extending our normal 30-day return window, to ensure that customers who are affected can return items without any inconvenience”).

Step 2: Update the status page.

All of the information shared through social media and other channels should be published to a dedicated status page, which — as the name suggests — exists for one purpose only: to highlight and describe the status of a website (or possibly multiple websites that are part of the same brand or portfolio). It is vital to keep the status page updated to reflect the current phase: investigating, fixing, resolving, and resolved.

In addition, the status page should invite visitors to subscribe, so that they can receive real-time notifications when things change — and ultimately, when they get back to normal.

Step 3: Conduct a postmortem and share the findings.

Once the outage is history, companies should figure out precisely what went wrong. Using a top-rated site uptime monitoring tool, like AlertBot, can provide helpful clues, and just as valuably, ensure that there isn’t a repeat performance. This information should be shared with the customer community and all other stakeholders, such as suppliers and strategic partners.

Typically, this information is shared through a blog post, which all social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (etc.) point to. Even if the company is not technically at fault (after all, nobody wants to be assailed by a DDoS attack), the fact remains that visitors were inconvenienced. An authentic apology goes a long way to easing frayed nerves and restoring trust.

The Bottom Line

Site outages are dreadful. Yet, they happen, and companies need to have a communication game plan to minimize the frustration for visitors, and the adverse impact on their reputation. The von Trapp Family singers would approve (and probably turn it into a song that you can’t get out of your head, no matter how hard you try).

10 Reasons for Site Crashes

by Louis Kingston

In the classic movie The Sound of Music, the whimsical governess Maria and the Von Trapp children sing about their favorite things — like raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens. It’s joyful, it’s inspiring, and it’s in perfect harmony backed by a full orchestra. Isn’t Austria lovely?

Well, if Maria and co. were running a website (perhaps something to do with selling lederhosen or offering hiking tours in the hills), here are 10 things that absolutely wouldn’t be among their favorite things since they cause sites to crash:

1. Coding errors, usually after a maintenance or an upgrade.
2. Bugs in the programming that, alas, should have been spotted and destroyed long ago.
3. Incompatible plugins and extensions. This is a BIG problem with WordPress sites!
4. Traffic surges, which may require upgrading the hosting package to get more disk space and/or implementing a content delivery network (CDN).
5. Malware attacks, which not only lead to site crashes, but can land businesses on blacklists that block legitimate emails from getting through.
6. Hacker attacks, such as DDoS. Sometimes businesses are targeted directly by bad actors or unhappy ex-customers, and sometimes businesses are caught up in the net as part of a large scale campaign.
7. Service provider and host errors, which are probably the most frustrating of all reasons for site crashes. There is virtually nothing that a business can do but wait for a third party to get their act together.
8. Domain expiry. Yes, sometimes sites crash simply because the domain wasn’t renewed.
9. Google blacklists, which happen when Google decides that a site is deceptive (note: this technically doesn’t cause a site to crash, but it effectively does the same thing since it blocks traffic).
10. Data center shutdowns, which happens during an emergency such as a fire or flood, or sometimes even by accident. For example, back in 2017 Amazon’s web host crashed due to an employee taking more servers offline than he intended (wonder what that guy’s next performance review was like?).

First, the Bad News…

AlertBot’s acclaimed technology cannot prevent these dreadful things from crashing your site — although now that you know what you’re up against, you can be proactive. For example, you should test all plugins/extensions before adding them to your site; make sure that you have the right hosting package, and so on.

…now, the Good News!

AlertBot’s acclaimed technology CAN make sure that your team is immediately notified whenever your site crashes, so that you can take switch action and resolve the problem before your visitors get frustrated and head to the competition.

Try AlertBot free and discover why it will quickly become one of your business’s favorite things. Heck, you might even start singing about it in the halls.  

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.