A website crashing typically means that your website is either temporarily or permanently unavailable to the users. Even though you can recover and restore your site from the crashes, they have their own troublesome effects.
Not to mention that WordPress sites are more vulnerable to crashes. The reason behind this is quite straightforward. Most people who build their sites on WordPress do it because of WordPress’s ease of access. All you have to do is install and activate the plugin to enable functionality on your site.
It’s all great initially, but as your site grows, they get prone to errors like “WordPress briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. check back in a minute”. In a nutshell, these crashes keep your audience from accessing your site’s content – which in return affects your impression of the audience and results in heartburns like heavy bounce-off rates and low traffic. Therefore, it would be great if you stay on top of your WordPress maintenance services.
In this read, we will discuss some major reasons websites crash and how you can prevent them. But before that, here some kinds of sites that are prone to crashes.
Let’s dive in
What Kind of Sites Are Prone To Crashes?
If you can relate to any of these factors mentioned below, the probability of your website experiencing a crash is high.
- Inexperienced staff working on your website.
- Poor quality maintenance or no maintenance at all.
- Acquiring third-party plugins for your sites.
- No plan for scaling your site.
Major Reasons Why Websites Crash
- Broken Lines Of Code
- Your Domain Name Is Expired
- Google Has Blacklisted Your Site
- Unsafe Plugins
- The unprecedented spike in website’s traffic
- Malware Attacks And Hacking
1. Broken Lines Of Code
Programming code can be referred to as the foundation of the building block of a site. This is because each functionality that your site performs and its features are made and work using backend code. If something goes wrong with the code of your site, then it is definitely going to crash.
To prevent crashes that occur due to broken lines of codes, it is essential to put the code in micro-services architecture while making changes. This is because even if one code get’s affected while being altered, the other can work seamlessly without being intercepted or affected. Moreover, as a site owner, it is also your responsibility to ensure that only skilled professionals can access and work on your site’s backend code.
Another great practice is to make changes in the code at times when the traffic is usually low. This will prevent the mass audience from accessing your website while it goes undergoes maintenance. In this way, even if a crash occurs, most of your audience wouldn’t even notice it, and you’ll get enough time to fix it.
2. Your Domain Name Is Expired
The domain name of your site is what your audience uses to find you. Also, it is the first thing that draws the users’ attention when they visit your site as it is a unique address that appears in the search bar at the top. If the domain name of your site is expired, then your website would immediately crash. Usually, this happens when a site owner doesn’t set automatic domain renewal on their name.
To avoid such a crash, it is important to reach out to your domain provider and renew the package before your existing domain name expires. A great way of avoiding this hassle is to set up and auto-renewal for your domain name.
Another way of easily preventing this error is by setting up a reminder on WHOIS, reminding you to renew your domain name three weeks in advance before it expires.
3. Google Has Blacklisted Your Website
Even though Google blacklisting your site cannot be counted in as a crash, but the effects are even worse than that. You definitely do not want your site’s credibility to be affected.
What happens in this blacklisting is that your website is accessible to the users. However, Google places a notice which indicates that your website consists of malware, maybe hacked, and harmful every time a user opens your site. This badly affects your impression as people start believing that your website is a scam and avoid making any purchases.
To avoid such issues, it is essential to audit your site thoroughly and remove any potential errors regularly.Moreover, you need to takedown any suspicious files or activity taking place in your site’s database. If your in-house team isn’t technical enough to handle such audits, it is better to hire website maintenance service providers to handle the job for you.
4. Unsafe Plugins
You must know the significance of plugins if you’ve built your website using a CMS such as WordPress. The biggest reason people opt for WordPress is its ease of access, which is achieved through the use of plugins. WordPress boasts over its collection of more than 50,000 plugins in the plugin directory.
Even though these plugins have made lives quite easier, but they’re the biggest reason why thousands of websites go down from the web.
There are thousands of third-party plugins out there in the directory that are unsafe because they haven’t been updated and cannot keep up with the latest security protocols. Technically, if you’re using such plugins on your website, you’re deliberately putting your site at risk of crashing anytime.
If you have the budget, we’d recommend you always go for the premium plugins and regularly update them as soon as new updates roll out.
If you don’t have the budget for premium plugins, you must first check the reviews, ratings, and last update of a plugin before integrating it with your website. If a plugin has more negative reviews or hasn’t been updated recently, you must find another one.
5. The unprecedented spike in website’s traffic
When you purchase hosting for your website, it allows you a certain bandwidth for the traffic. If the traffic of your sees a spike above the bandwidth, it crashes because a website cannot handle the traffic beyond the limit allowed by the hosting.
In order to prevent such crashes, the great idea is to purchase a hosting depending upon your website’s needs. Another modern and great way to avoid this crash is to purchase scalable hosting packages (Cloud Hosting) in the first place. Opting for the cloud has two major advantages.
First, you can easily scale up your package if your website traffics gets bigger and similarly downsize your package when traffic is low. The second advantage comes around the cost – which means that you’ll only have to pay for the bandwidth you’re using.
6. Malware Attacks And Hackings
Malware attacks and Hackings could be a disaster. Not to mention very few website owners tend to take care of their sites, especially in hacking and malware. Those who neglect the importance of website maintenance services often fall prey to such issues. Once your website gets hacked, the hacker can either delete your entire site or siphon its entire data.
Another big issue that comes around hacking is ransomware, where a hacker denies you access to your website unless you pay them a huge sum of money. A great example could be the WannaCry ransomware attack which inflicted a massive loss of millions of dollars.
In order to keep your site from malware attacks and hacking, one must stay on top of their website maintenance game. This is because thorough audits of a website allow you to locate malicious files and suspicious activities happening in your website’s database – which you can remove. Moreover, regular website maintenance always helps you keep up with the latest security protocols.
So, there you go. These were the 6 major reasons why websites often crash and how you can prevent them. Before we conclude, here are some important FAQs that you should know.
Important FAQs
1. How Bad Can A Website Crash Impact you?
A website crash has many long-term and short-term impacts. The first and most significant disadvantage of website crashes is that they significantly hurt your online reputation, causing a decline in traffic.
The long-term disadvantages may include a gradual decline in Google search rankings that you suffer even if your site goes live again after resolving the crash.
2. What kind Of websites Are Most Vulnerable To Crashes?
Several factors are responsible for getting a website crashed. The major ones include poor or low-quality website maintenance, unsafe plugins, and inexperienced individuals working on the website’s code.
Staying on top of website maintenance can help you easily prevent crashes for such reasons.
3. How To Check If My Website Is Crashed?
There are multiple paid and free tools available online that can help you determine whether or not the site is crashed. However, the most evident factor is that your website is no more accessible on its domain name.
Conclusion
Your website is more than just a virtual presence – in fact, you can call it a virtual front door of your business. If it works in a stellar condition, there’s nothing that can stop your business from skyrocketing. Therefore, it is essential always to get a skilled team of developers and website managers that can keep it perfect.
