What a Reliable Websites Means for Local Businesses
Whether you’re a large or small business, reliable websites and support are critical to customer retention. Your customers expect that your website to always work. Not only does it need to look great on their phone, it has to provide a consistent experience across all their devices. Website reliability can be broken down into a few key areas: styles and layout, front-end manipulation, back-end code, and hosting. If any of these areas break down, then the website experience your business is providing customers will suffer. This can lead to lost revenue from missed sales and hurt long-term customer retention. In this article we’ll tell you about a few ways we make sure our websites stay reliable for local businesses.
What does website reliability mean for businesses? When it comes to styles and layout, we are referring to how the website looks. Do the headings look the right size, is text fitting neatly into boxes, are the colors for links still correct? If your business’s website suddenly has too much padding on one side, or text is overflowing in a box, it could mean the styles broke.
Imagine you run an investment firm company. You have a form that users fill out and as they fill out the form, it’s supposed to do some calculations on the fly. Unfortunately, those calculations broke. This could mean that the code that handles front-end manipulation (e.g., javascript) is broken. When users submit the form, a critical error is displayed. This could be a result of back-end code no longer working as a result of a recent update. If you’re on a shared server, you may experience server hiccups where the server stops responding and you can’t access the site. None of these examples are good for business. Each can destroy a possible relationship with a customer that you had been building over days, weeks, or months. So what do you do?
The Role of Hosting Uptime and Monitoring
At CH Web Agency, we start by making sure we know what’s happening on your site. We monitor our sites with a 24/7 website monitor. If the website doesn’t respond, meaning there is an error with hosting, we are immediately notified and we investigate the issue. Fortunately, for websites we support, this is extraordinarily rare. However, we know that many businesses struggle with this type of responsiveness. If you need help our team is standing by to support you. The type of hosting you have is a key part of website reliability. You can learn more about website hosting in our deep dive on hosting for local businesses.
The important takeaway regarding hosting is that you need to pick your hosting provider and plan carefully. If you go with a very cost effective plan from a big name hosting provider, you may not get the reliability and performance that you expect. The reason for this is that the big name hosting providers offer shared hosting services where you can share a server with websites that haven’t received updates in ten years. You could also be very lucky and get a great server, where everyone’s website is optimized. But, the important thing to note is that you don’t get to pick who shares the server with you.
How is that different from our approach? We offer hosting on a dedicated server shared by only our clients. Our clients are vetted and receive updates throughout the month. We monitor attacks and performance, meaning that disruption to your site as a result of another website’s performance is mitigated. On shared hosting from one of the big name providers, this isn’t guaranteed.Â
What about the code and other updates? That’s where a dedicated support team is critical for businesses.
Why Dedicated Support Teams Matters
You can of course wing it and try to support your website yourself. But, winging it means that when you have that critical sale you’re trying to lock down, there’s no guarantee that your website is going to be at its best. It could have layout issues, critical errors, form submission issues. A dedicated support team for your business will provide regular updates, layout fixes, and performance checks.
A dedicated support team means that you have direct access to help for your website at all times. At CH Web Agency, we are responsive, trusted, and here to provide exceptional website support to keep your website up and running. Whether you prefer chat, email, Zoom, or in-person, we can help make sure your website remains reliable.
We do this by making sure that we design responsive websites with thoughtful layouts that are difficult to break. This reduces your risk of having layout issues down the road. Our javascript is well written and tested, so that it doesn’t interact with other code on the website. This mitigates issues like we described above for the investment business. Our php code is well written and reviewed. We push all updates ourselves and check for errors after each update.
Planned Updates vs Emergency Fixes
Our updates are scheduled and planned for. This mitigates unexplained errors on the website. While not impossible, it is unlikely that there is a critical error or major issue with our websites. You might wonder why that is. The reason is that updates are planned. The website will typically break after plugins, themes, or code versions are updated. If nothing is changed, the website won’t break. We check to make sure our websites are compatible with code updates. If there is an error, we’ll hold off on that update until we’ve resolved the compatibility issue. What does this mean for our clients, that our websites are reliable for local businesses. You shouldn’t have to report errors.
Emergency fixes are when there is an error that wasn’t accounted for and we need to patch the website. This would usually happen as a result of some edge case. An example would be a form submission that does some calculations with the submission. If the code wasn’t designed to handle the input appropriately, there could be some error. We test our websites thoroughly before launch, so again, these types of errors are rare.
Building Trust through Reliable Websites for Local Businesses
You can trust our agency to make sure your website stays up and running in your most critical moments. Similarly, your customers will trust you, because the website is working as expected on their device of choice. In so many cases, businesses have to make difficult decisions to expand, grow, pivot and stay strategic. When it comes to website reliability, we want to make that decision easy. The CH Web Agency team is ready to be your new support team.
