Introduction
A site under maintenance can be down for the customers and visitors creating a stressful environment for them. In this digital era, full of competition and a fast-paced business environment, pulling through a website maintenance situation without facing any harm and loss can be challenging. A lot of teamwork and determination is required to ensure things run smoothly with your website and efforts are unnoticeable for people outside the organization.
TABLE OF CONTENT:
Introduction
why you need a website under maintenance?
How to keep control during site work when the website is under maintenance?
- Prepare a user roadmap
- Fast verification and sharing
- Communication is key!
- Provide details on the issue
- Engage your brand and company culture
- Be active on social channels
- Keep it light
- Focusing on value
- Do a final recap
How must be the website maintenance and error pages be like?
- Keeping an appropriate tone
- Being polite
- Do not blame the users
- Be informative
- Provide up-to-date information
- Brand the page
Conclusion
Closing
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Why do you need a website under maintenance?
In many situations, users have less understanding and appreciation of the work you do to keep the site running smoothly, correctly without any interruption or glitches. This usually happens when your site is under maintenance and a situation arises where the team working in the background restores your site.
In today’s ever-increasing online need for technology and security, encountering a website down for maintenance can impact your company’s brand and market perception, end-users, and cause additional workload on your customer service causing a revenue loss that can be devastating for any business website owner.
Rather than thinking over the problems much and thinking of losses you should focus on a game plan to avoid these losses when your website is under maintenance. Staying ahead of the situation is the best you can do while your website is under maintenance and find out strategies that can help you resolve the matter in a clean and efficient manner.
You can put up some error and maintenance messages that direct the users about the issues you are currently resolving and what will be the duration it would take for your website to be up back again.
How to keep control during site work when the website is under maintenance?
These are the steps one must follow while a website is under maintenance,
- Prepare a user roadmap
Having clear with your pathway for your website to quickly react whenever the site is under maintenance and there is a need for measures to be taken. Having a roadmap is preplanning the scenarios that help in eliminating the burden over you and your customers while any outages occur. Taking the initiative for help in any further plans that can keep your customer service positive.
- Fast verification and sharing
Before posting any update over the page, you must be sure of the issue and conduct internal testing of the issue to determine if the issue is right and the finding out the root cause of the issues. That helps you ensure the problem with your website and you can share the right information regarding your website maintenance and can accurately determine the time to solve the issue that will increase the trust and credibility of your business organization.
- Communication is key!
Being consistent and reliable with the information during any critical condition or disastrous situation is vital. Providing estimated time when your website is down and giving timely updates of projection as new information becomes available and communicating with the users is the main key in not degrading your website value. Updating is the main key as keeping your website as no further developments and keeping your users unaware of the situation is bad, rather keep them updated with the resolving of issues of your website.
If you are unsure about how long it would take your website to fix, then time provide status about the on-going maintenance for every half an hour. People feel better when they know about the ongoing work and updates you provide.
- Provide details on the issue
Providing your customers with irrelevant technical details or overwhelming terms that are over their understanding capacity, rather provide a simple overview or summary over the issue and how it impacts the user experience. Having a plan and sharing it with the users helps build confidence that the situation is in hand and under control.
Most of the users appreciate that the information or error messages are small and understandable being precise with the information that can help in understanding the situation.
- Engage your brand and company culture
Engaging your website maintenance page with the brand gives you another opportunity to showcase your brand to the new visitors that visit your website during website maintenance downtime.
Having the ability to sculpt your brand with all the website properties that the user may encounter in a single look such as adding familiar products that are an important aspect of your website. Or using your business logo and portray your website with your brand that shows all your hard work and effort in one single page.
- Be active on social channels
With the rising usage of your website, your site is more potentially exposed on social media, where you can leverage these channels for your marketing as well as updating with ant website maintenance work going on, provide with company information and the time that will be taken to complete the maintenance work and solving the issues with your website. It is the best means to notify the users regarding the website maintenance as well as any type of updates you want to give for your website. Many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram offer real-time updates for your customers as well as employee
- Keep it light
The best time to shine is under circumstances that are not favorable for us. Keeping the things in perspective light can minimize the frustration that can later arise among the users for not knowing about your website downtime. Being kept it dark and not updating with anything can annoy to the most. Being accountable and taking responsibility and assuring the uptime of your website as soon as possible can be the best way to calm the situation among the users.
- Focusing on value
Focussing on the value of maintenance and how much that means to keep your user experience going is the vital choice.
- Do a final recap
Always check your website into smaller platforms where you can see the updates are actually been done and will provide a better user experience. Being transparent with your visitors and doing a final recap of all the functionalities and checking the website meets all the demands is important. Striving for the best user experience and more conversion rates improvements is necessary for the longer run.
How must be the website maintenance and error pages be like?
Your error messages must be creative as well as on point as no one reads an error message that is too big. It’s strange for setting up error messages but having a custom error page while your page faces an error makes you ready for the situation beforehand.
Here are few tips you want to keep in mind while you are designing your error pages when your website is under maintenance, these are obvious points one should keep in mind and is the best advice needed,
- Keeping an appropriate tone
Keeping the tone polite with the line of service is important. The tone must be entertaining and polite at the same time and if not, maybe there is a chance of adding some sarcastic jokes to your way of presenting your error.
- Being polite
You have to be polite and not cause any inconvenience to the visitor, doing so can make a worse situation for you in terms of reviews.
- Do not blame the users
Sometimes there are error pages that blame the user interaction which causes the downtime of the website which can be very much unappealing for the visitors. Rather than that, posting something such as something that went wrong and describing the technical failure is the best solution to do so.
- Be informative
Letting the user know what is going on and what are measures you are taking for the website to be back online in no time can help the user in knowing your condition and understanding it for your better good.
- Provide up-to-date information
If you have any status page, link it to the website where users can see a timely update of your website status.
- Brand the page
Even if it is a simple error message, branding your page is most important such as including a logo or introducing your website, etc.
These are the above advice that can help in displaying an error message rather than a 404 page not found error message.
Conclusion
Being precise for your users and execute proper management while your brand website is under maintenance is the main key to have a successful business without losing customers. Every website may encounter downtime while maintenance but having a proper tactic to overcome the period of maintenance without any loss is the vital key that shows the commitment of your website to the profession.
Closing
IntCIS provides you with a wide range of website maintenance plans and methods to keep your website performance up to date. We provide the best service plans where your customers won’t be caused inconvenience while website maintenance takes place.
Get started with IntCIS website care:
We offer several website–care packages that will ensure your site is up to date, functions correctly, and remains secure.
For more info and about us visit IntCIS support.
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