My Website Is Down: What to Do

Has your website ever gone down?

(If you have a GoDaddy site, then you might have experienced the drama last week when someone hacked their system and made a whole lot of sites disappear from the interwebs.)

Aack! What a worst-case scenario! Your online business (and if you have a virtual business, your entire business) shut down. Closed up. No way to contact you. If you have an @yourdomain.com email address, your email probably also stopped working.

So what do you do?

First: Breathe

Second: When your first notice your website is down, contact your hosting company (via phone since your email isn’t working). They’ll be able to tell if they’re aware of the problem, already working on it and what the timeframe is for getting you back up (or if they’re not already aware, they’ll tell you what to do.)

Third: Pause any traffic you’re sending to your site intentionally.

What traffic am I talking about?

• CPC campaigns (like Adwords, Facebook Ads, LinkendIn ads, etc.)
• Scheduled Tweets, Facebook posts, and other social media with links back to your site
• Email marketing campaigns (MailChimp, Aweber, etc.) that are set to go out in the immediate future

Fourth: Let your people know how to contact you.

Part of the bonus of having social media accounts for your business is for situations like these. Send out a tweet, Facebook post, etc. saying you know the site’s down (and if your email is down, that too), you’re working on it and if you need to get in touch give you a call at XXX.XXXX.

Depending on how your current customers contact you or interact with your website, you may consider calling them or notifying them with another email address.

Fifth: Add a Google Analytics Annotation to your account.

A few months from now, when looking at your Analytics data, you’ll wonder what was the weird dip in traffic? An annotation lets you put your data in context.

Here’s how to do that.

Sixth: Consider switching hosting companies

At the moment, I’m using Hostgator, which I’m really happy with.

How to Prevent the Damage

To avoid this fate in the future, it’s a good idea to have systems in place to back up:

• your website
• your email marketing list
• your analytics data

And of course, make sure you’re using secure passwords for all your accounts and regularly changing them.

Your Turn

Has your website ever gone down? What would you add to the list? Did you find this helpful? Let me know in the comments!

photo credit: Nadya Peek via photo pin cc