If you’re searching for ‘Why does my website crash?’ today, you are not alone. We probably get asked this very question a few times a week.
When your website is crashing it can become completely frustrating and can also lead to a terrible user experience for any visitors. A bad user experience makes it easy for a user to never want to visit your website again. Think about the last time a page took too long to load, or a link did not work… Pretty aggravating right? So what did you do? You most likely logged out and visited another website where the pages and links actually were working.
Time to break down the 6 reasons why websites crash:
Why does my website crash? Server Error
First and foremost, your website is currently hosted on a server(if you have one). This server is responsible for ensuring that your website is working smoothly. Sometimes, the server will crash and you will have no control over the crash, as your site will go down with it. The server crashing will cause temporary black outs. If this is what is happening to your website, make sure you contact the support team of your website server, let them know what you are experiencing and ask them for an update on when the server will be up and running again.
Our pro-tip: Ensure you are working with a server that is reliable. Ask your server company; What their hosts uptime guarantee is? The uptime guarantee is the amount of time in a full calendar year that the server is up and running. You want the server company to say 100% of the time, but anything as close to 100% as possible is great, but nothing less than 99.97%.
A quick way to tell that your server has gone down is if your website is displaying a 502 or 503 number. With that said, If your website is always having issues on the server side, we recommend looking into new servers.
Broken Code
Broken code can happen whenever updates are made to the theme or to a page . Let’s say you updated a photo, or swapped out a call to action button. Any small movements on the website can cause the website to break the code. Since code is a written sequence, any little edit can make it crash and become broken.
A few reasons why your website may have crashed is because there may have been an update to the page, theme, or plug-ins.
It’s very important that you always make all updates in a staging environment prior to moving all changes to the live site. This step allows you to see if the changes you created to the code are corresponding well within the current code.
Why does my website crash? Bad Hosting
You will always experience terrible load times on your website, if you have a bad hosting partner. The average user will think there is something wrong with your website and will exit out. A bad hosting service will ultimately also hurt your SEO performance and google site ranking.
But the good news is that bad hosting can be easily fixed by evaluating your current hosting plan, and making the necessary updates. Most small business owners start off by getting a cheap hosting plan known as Shared hosting, but you will outgrow this stage very fast. If your site is crashing, go ahead and see what plan you have with your host. The bigger your website and traffic becomes, the more support you will require from your hosting provider in things like storage, bandwidth and memory.
If you have not touched or checked in with your hosting plan, it’s a good time to start, chances are it will need to get updated regardless if this is or isn’t what’s causing the website to crash.
Pro tip: Don’t select the shared hosting plan. If you have a bit wiggle in your budget, put it towards a better hosting plan.
Too Much Traffic
Traffic can make a website crash, but let’s face it we are not releasing a pair of NIKE shoes. So that means your website should not crash due to traffic, because chances are you are not getting millions of visitors per minute around the world.
So why is the traffic crashing your website?
Traffic can indeed crash a site if the bandwidth is not high enough to support the visitors. This goes back to what we talked about earlier; bad hosting. If you have a very minimal hosting plan, it limits the amount of visitors you can have.
With a very low performing hosting plan, expect to have your website crash. It is best to check and upgrade your hosting plan prior to a sale or promotion on your marketing campaigns.
If you anticipate spikes in visitors to your website, we would recommend you to look into cloud hosting. Cloud hosting is one of our favorites as it allows you to control the bandwidth of your website and gives you flexibility.
Why does my website crash? Theme Updates
I know some of you reading this article are probably guilty of not checking up on your websites. We find that many website owners that have WordPress sites and have purchased themes on platforms like Divi.com or Elementor.com, learn the hard way that when WordPress.com does an update, the theme can break.
This is perfectly normal, and sometimes it requires a small adjustment for everything to go back to normal.
However, if you do not have someone monitoring your website, or you do not have email notifications that notify you when a WordPress.com update has been made, then you sadly won’t find out if something broke until someone tells you.
Expired Domain
Expired domains are something that many website owners never pay much attention to unless their website is no longer found. Our instant advice? Put a reminder for when it’s time to renew your website, so you don’t lose your website domain entirely. Trust me, you don’t want to miss this one!
Website domains come up for renewal depending on the amount of years you have originally purchased it for. We recommend that you purchase your website domains for 10, 15, or 20 years, right from the start. This ensures that you won’t forget, but also gets you the best price.
After all, you’re in this for the long ride. If you have an expired domain please call immediately and work on getting it back. The domain company may give you a grace period, but waiting too long means you may risk never getting your domain back.
Last but not least; What can you do to avoid having your website crash? Probably a good idea to have someone on support at all times.
That’s it for this learning moment,
