7 Stats About Website Downtime You Need to Know

Uptime

Data speaks for itself, which is why we've compiled the 7 most surprising stats from our uptime monitoring report. See to believe!

How Many People Experience Website Downtime

If we had a pound for every time someone said that website downtime wouldn't affect them, we'd be millionaires many times over (and what a life that would be!). Unfortunately, website downtime is impartial and can catch you off guard.

Our latest statistic revealed that:

71% of companies experienced unplanned partial downtime, as well as unplanned full downtime. 100% of companies experienced planned downtime. Partial downtime means that some pages or sections of the website are inaccessible, while full downtime means the entire site is offline (StatusCake Survey 2021).

The Impact of Not Having Uptime Monitoring Solutions

It's common to think that a brief downtime will have little impact on your revenue or customer satisfaction. Wrong. Our data shows that website downtime affects various areas of your business. Additionally, domain issues, server failures, slow page load times, and expired SSL certificates also cause significant damage.

Consider this statistic, for example:

79% of the websites we surveyed experienced one or more of the following situations:

• Domain loss, either through hijackers or expiration.
• Loss of customers due to an unsecured website (lack of SSL certificate).
• Revenue loss due to unexpected downtime.
• Loss of customer trust due to server downtime.
• Loss of customers to competitors due to slow page speed.
• SEO ranking drops due to all the above issues.

How Companies Discover Website Downtime

Many believe they will "sense" when their website goes down, almost like a sixth sense. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, and the chances of your team detecting the issue before customers are very slim.

Here's the proof:

8 out of 10 people who did not use an uptime monitoring tool found out about website downtime through customer emails or social media mentions.

What Does Website Downtime Really Mean?

If you're wondering what exactly website downtime means after reading all these stats, you're not alone:

According to our recent survey of 1500 people, 32% did not know what website downtime meant.

Website downtime can mean a partial or full "downtime," making your site offline or inaccessible.

Customer Perception of Website Downtime

We are all online customers, whether for banking, grocery shopping, or ordering food. So, what do we think about website downtime? Does it really matter to us?

When we asked 1500 people about the likelihood of revisiting a website after failing to access it once, only 11% said they would return, stating it would be difficult to trust the site afterward.

Frequency of Website Downtime

Of our 140,000 customers using our uptime monitoring tool, 32% identify as small businesses, 41% as medium businesses, and 27% as large businesses. Among the small businesses, they experience downtime, on average, at least 18 times per month.

An Example of an Outage Affecting Global Companies

There are many examples we could use, especially considering companies like Facebook, which experience frequent downtime, causing millions in losses for businesses using their paid ads. A notable example is the Fastly outage: StatusCake observed a 58% increase in website downtime during this period compared to the previous week, demonstrating companies' reliance on CDNs.