Today I was contacted by a business owner looking for help to figure out why their website was broken – fortunately one of his customers had notified him.
It didn’t take long to figure out the issue, first I checked the domain name hosting on Godaddy to ensure it hadn’t expired – all good on that front.
Then onto the hosting side of things, in this case it was a Wix site. As soon as I logged in I saw the problem – it said “Free plan, upgrade to premium to connect your custom domain”.
Just as I thought – his subscription had expired back in September. In this case he had purchased a 2 year hosting plan with Wix which didn’t have an auto renew option enabled.
That means his site has been offline close to 3 months!
How soon would you find out your site was offline?
In this case it was almost 3 months, what would it mean to your business to lose your website for a period of time?
How many lost leads would that amount to?
Solution: Get your SEO / web provider to implement an up-time checker – this is a simple tool which pings your site at regular intervals and lets you know if it ever goes offline.
Are your subscriptions up to date & auto renewing?
If your business is here to stay, then you should just go into your domain and hosting provider admin panels (e.g. HostGator, Godaddy, Wix) and ensure that your domain name(s) and hosting are set to auto renew.
Forgetting to renew a domain name can be disastrous as it goes back onto the domain auction market where anyone can come along and buy it as their own.
If you have concerns about any of the above or want to discuss SEO options for your own business site, get in touch with us here.