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Whether your website is B2B or B2C focused, downtime can be frustrating and potentially costly if you have maintenance windows or code pushes happening within your business’ golden hours. So what’s the solution? Out of hours of course.
Whether we’re migrating an existing website to Impact’s managed hosting, pushing an update, or launching a new website, it seems there is never a good time to have a website in maintenance mode.
Maintenance windows are usually a period of time when a visitor to a website will see a holding page with a message displayed to inform them of an upcoming change or explanation for downtime. Kind of like a curtain waiting to be pulled back for the big reveal.
However, for businesses with websites that are busy throughout the day, putting their website in maintenance mode literally turns off the tap to sales and leads.
Unfortunately in some cases, they are. Migrating a website from one server to another can sometimes take time to get everything up and running again. Rather than display a broken website, the maintenance window provides clear instructions or guidance on what’s happening and what to expect.
Even some larger website updates can require the website to go into a maintenance window, to ensure that everything is correctly configured, tested and functional before the new update is released into the wild.
On a website redesign project, launch day can take several hours in some cases to ensure everything is fully functional from the legacy website to the new website.
Typically most agencies including ourselves would operate regular business hours 9 am – 5 pm Monday to Friday. However, we only recommend pushing code Mon-Thur. Nobody wants a call on a Saturday morning as the code pushed at 5 pm on Friday has bugs or the client has an emergency change request.
But a B2B business, for example, will be busier between 9 am-5 pm on a Monday to Friday because that’s their operating hours. So why would they want to lose risking opportunities by placing a maintenance window during this period?
An E-commerce website, on the other hand, might be busy during evenings and weekends and quieter during the daytime, or they might be busy every day. So choosing a suitable maintenance window can be far more challenging.
Look at your website Analytics and check when your least busy time of the day for traffic and sales/leads is. This could be 4 am on a Tuesday Morning or Sunday at 11 pm. Depending on the update and length of time required, these would be your best maintenance window opportunities.
Every website is different but by checking your analytics data you can select a time best suited to a maintenance window that will cause the least disruption. Then you can begin notifying your customers/users.
For some time now our team has been providing out-of-hours support to assist in migrations, development code pushes and website launches. These are planned events and maintenance windows and are agreed upon with our team members working on the project.
We have an out-of-hours rate that is applied so that we can compensate the team members for sometimes working what would be classed as a graveyard shift to help get new sites live.
Whilst our team began to tackle out-of-hours migrations and code pushes, we also began investigating out-of-hours support.
As an additional service option for support clients with websites critical to the success of their business, we provide a 24/7 support service, or an evening, weekend & bank holiday support service (more on this coming soon).
Although there never really is a perfect time for a maintenance window, having control over when this happens is the key here.
Notifying customers and being able to explore the best time that will cause the least impact, and ensuring that a team like our Impacters are on hand to help ensure your migration, launch or code push runs smoothly, regardless of the time of day.
If your current agency is strict on deployment times and you know 3 am code pushes will mean you can keep an extra hour between 9-5, then reach out to us at Impact and see how we can help.
Best of all, when these out-of-hours deployments are rolled out, our clients are usually wrapped up in bed or at home, away from their desks. So don’t think you have to be on hand either.
When you are planning to have your website in maintenance mode, ensure paid advertising and campaigns are inactive, so you’re not wasting ad budget driving traffic to the website.
Notify customers prior to the maintenance window to let them know when it’s likely to happen and for how long. Sending an email is an opportunity to notify them, whilst being in their inbox and front of mind.
Promote on your social channels too, as you want to avoid getting tagged or messaged by a customer who is having difficulty or cannot access the website during a maintenance window.
If you’d like to learn more about our WordPress & WooCommerce Support & Maintenance plans, drop us an email or give James a call.
Our plans provide a holistic solution to your website’s performance, reliability and security, and are inclusive of premium tools and services.
