What is uptime?
Uptime is how much of the time your website is up and available to access by website visitors. It is usually written as a percentage, for example if a website has 99% uptime it is accessible 99% of the time, and down 1% of the time and unavailable approximately 88 hours in a year.Why does uptime matter?
There are a lot of reasons to care about uptime. Too low uptime can lead to reduced traffic to your site or reduced revenue for e-commerce site. According to Google 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, which means that if your website is down, even for a short time, you are likely to lose potential visitors.Other than losing traffic during the downtime, your website may also get a bad reputation among visitors as an unreliable site.
Search engines like Google also give sites with high uptime a higher ranking in search results.
What is good uptime?
The uptime of your website should, of course, be as high as possible. It is, however, impossible to get perfect uptime. It is popular to try to aim for 99.999% uptime, or “five 9s availability”, but doing so is usually very expensive since it requires very stable servers and often redundancies in order to account for possible issues. A more achievable uptime is 99.9%, which is often recommended as a standard uptime for websites. For comparison the average uptime for websites in 2022 was 99.81%, slightly below the recommended 99.9%.Summary
In summary it is generally recommended to have an uptime of at least 99.9%, and having too low of an uptime can affect the amount of traffic to your site, revenue generated by the site, and the sites ranking in search engines.If you need to monitor the uptime of your website we can help you set up website uptime monitoring here.
