Websites have their issues, are you prepared to fix them?
Technology has issues—and it seems like these issues always arise when you least want them to. For example, on my birthday I walked into the office and discovered this. The image on the left is what our website should look like, but the image on the right is how it actually looked. Notice the difference?
If you came into the office and found your website all wrong, would you have a process in place to quickly resolve the issue? Would you even know how to diagnose the problem? If you answered “no” to both questions, you’re probably in good company. Many small business owners have no idea how to respond to website failures—and yet we know these failures are coming because, as I said, technology has issues.
Now, on that morning, I’ll be honest, my first thought was “what happened, and why did it have to happen on my birthday?” But I do know how to diagnose website problems, and within a few minutes I discovered what had happened (why it chose my birthday, I’ll never know). More importantly, we had a recovery process in place, so the website was back up in only a few minutes, thanks to our hosting package at SiteGround.
When choosing a hosting package, always look beyond the price. How is the performance? Support? What is included in the hosting package? In our case, we have automatic daily backups stored for 30 days. With a few clicks, we can revert the website back to a day when the issue didn’t exist. However, at KazSource, we update our website daily with new articles and podcasts, so even one or two days of lost updates would cause issues. So before even restoring the website, I used another great resource from our package, the staging tool, which creates a temporary, non-live duplicate of the site. While this feature is usually used for making design changes, having a duplicate lets me copy the new content and paste it into the restored version of the website.
Now, I’m not a huge fan of birthdays, but I’m glad I didn’t have to spend all of mine working to resolve a crisis. It’s nice there’s a plan in place, not for if this happens, but for when it happens.
Websites crash, websites have issues—even the big business websites crash, and they pour millions upon millions of dollars into their sites. So it will happen. The only question left is—are you prepared?