Website Backups: Why you need to backup right now!
Picture the scene:
It’s Monday morning and you’ve just arrived in work. You’re sipping a nice cup of something hot and browsing through your emails: delete the usual junk and scan through the inbox looking for anything urgent. Nothing seems out of place but you feel like something’s not quite right.
Slowly, it dawns on you that the number of website orders & inquiries are much lower than usual. You’ve got far fewer than expected, which is odd because most of your customers contact you over the weekend. You quickly load up the company website and… it’s not there! It’s just gone. What the hell…?
Panic rising: “How can a whole website be just gone?”
For a minute you can’t think what to do next. How can a whole website be just gone? This is nuts, how are customers going to find me! You do a quick search for the email address of your web design guy and fire off a frantic message. “RE: Website down! Call immediately – urgent!!”
When you don’t get a reply in 2 minutes, you pull up the number and call. When they pick up, you quickly explain what’s happened and ask to get the site back online. Unfortunately, the web company are super busy right now, so it will take while to fix the site. How long? Maybe a few hours, maybe a few days – and all the while you’re losing business. How much is this going to cost?
Bad News: The Cost of Restoring Your Website
As you have no backups or maintenance agreement with the web company, you’ll be paying their stiff standard rate. And as your entire site is gone, it will take quite some time (all charged at that nice hourly rate) to get it back up – all assuming that company even has a copy of your website on file (it’s possible they won’t).
So you may end up paying a substantial chunk of money just to get your site back to where it was on Friday.
More Bad News: The Hidden Costs
The real costs are, of course, hidden: the lost business. How many potential customers got to your site, ready to order, only to find nothing there? No way for them to find you – no email or phone number because the site is just gone. These now-frustrated potential customers simply go back to Google and find someone else – you just lost your customers to the competition!
Another nasty surprise lies in store: Those lost clients will associate failure with your company. Whenever they see your company name or logo they’ll think of a missing website (and assume there’s an unprofessional business behind it). They will be lost to you, not just this time, but for good.
Happily, There Is A Solution
So, what can you do to avoid this situation and keep your website online? How can you make sure that you always have backups of your website ready to go in an emergency? The answer to both these questions is, happily enough, quite straightforward.
First things first: How to avoid your site going offline
The best way to avoid your site being hacked or otherwise damaged is to ensure that the code is bang up-to-date. This means ensuring your website is well maintained and watched over. The inner workings of websites are quite complicated and different parts can go out-of-date at different times. You must have someone looking at it from time-to-time to keep them all updated. Your website designer can do this for you.
Keeping the website code up-to-date will go a long way to prevent hackers gaining access to (and disabling) your website. However, there’s no absolutely perfect way to protect a website, so it’s only prudent to prepare a back-up of your site.
Second things second: How to prepare for when the site goes offline
To mitigate the worst effects of a website going down, you absolutely must do one thing: Back it up now, and back it up regularly after that. We can’t emphasize this enough. In fact, regular scheduled backups are a great idea. Most web companies can provide this service for you, at a low monthly cost. Doing this overcomes the problem of paying your designer to rebuild the entire site from scratch. If your site is hacked and goes offline, at least you have a simple and quick solution: Get the backup website live and you’re back in business!
Dedicated Solutions
We provide a dedicated regular back-up & update service for websites. Find out more by clicking here.
Speak to Us Direct
To learn more about protecting your website, give us a call on +353 (0)1 525 2209 or contact us at info@patrickcaseydesign.com. We’ll give you a no-obligation consultation on website site backups. Call now!