As consumers, we’ve all been there. You visit a website, ready to make an important or exciting purchase, and you find the business’s website is down. It could be scheduled maintenance, could be planned maintenance or an unplanned outage.

The response for the visitor is the same—disappointment. The result for the business? Potentially, a lost sales opportunity.

Downtime, when a website is offline and unavailable to customers, is an important metric to closely monitor with your WordPress website. It carries significant financial and reputational costs and, conversely, makes uptime guarantees an important factor to consider when deciding on a WordPress hosting provider.

What Is Uptime and Why Does It Matter?

Uptime is typically defined as the percentage of time that the web hosting service guarantees that your website will be up and available. Uptime is directly correlated to the amount of time your website is online, available, and accessible to visitors.

The importance of uptime can sometimes be lost among the many production, operations, and financial moving parts of a business. But make no mistake, if your business revenue is in any way reliant on online sales through your website, uptime is incredibly important to your bottom line. A consistently available website can deliver sales; a down website cannot.

The Tangible Costs of WordPress Downtime

The impact of a website’s downtime can be felt by the business in numerous ways. The first and most obvious effect is lost revenue. When the website is down, your business is losing out on direct sales. How much? Many factors go into calculating downtime. In 2024, E-N Computers calculated that a company with $10 million in revenue loses about $55,000 a day when its website goes down. No matter the amount, no company wants to lose out on that kind of money. But that’s not the only revenue being lost.

A down website also means that you are losing out on lead generation, missed opportunities to identify and cultivate new customers. Advertising takes a hit as well.

Any advertising that was purchased to help drive customers to your website also ends up being wasted.

Beyond potential revenue, there are also productivity losses tied to your website downtime. When the website is down, your team is unable to access necessary resources on the website nor can they make any updates. Some workers may be idling until the website is up and accessible. This can also cause delays to content publishing on the website. Marketing efforts may have to wait until the website is back up.

The Intangible Costs of WordPress Downtime

Beyond the measurable costs, there are additional, less easy to measure, costs to downtime with your WordPress website. To start with, there is potential damage to your business’s reputation and its brand. Website availability is a standard expectation among consumers. Customers appreciate frictionless purchase experiences. A down website can be perceived by many consumers as unprofessional and viewed negatively.

Customers can experience meaningful relationships with brands. Experiencing a down website can damage that relationship and erode the customer’s confidence and loyalty in the brand. A common tactic among frustrated customers is to go to social media and call out brands for their perceived faults.

Not surprisingly, customers who lose trust in a brand may no longer feel a sense of loyalty. A down website could be the tipping point that turns them to seek out a competitor. This kind of customer about-face can be very difficult to reverse.

In addition to frustrated customers, your website’s downtime can negatively impact your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. Search engines like Google may de-index or lower the ranking of your website if it is frequently unavailable. This leads to a compounding loss of organic traffic and overall visibility on the internet.

Understanding Uptime Guarantees

With so much potentially at risk with a down website, WordPress site hosting services make a point to emphasize and guarantee their uptime. An uptime guarantee is a promise from the service provider that your website will be up and available to visitors for a certain percentage of time, often by the month. Typical uptimes range from 99.9% to 99.99%, which translates into roughly 45 minutes to 5 minutes per month, respectively. A hosting service provider’s uptime guarantee is spelled out in its service level agreement (SLA).

At Pressable, we have gone the extra mile with our 100% uptime guarantee. This is made possible thanks to our high-availability hosting platform on the WP Cloud. This means real-time replication of your website to multiple geographic locations at any given moment, making downtime a thing of the past!

What Does Your SLA Say About Uptime Guarantee?

It is important to read your SLA closely before signing up with a service provider, as certain circumstances are often excluded from the guarantee, such as scheduled maintenance. The SLA should transparently spell out the uptime percentage, the time period measured, exclusions, remedies, and penalties. Remedies for not fulfilling the uptime guarantee are often service credits or similar compensation. It’s good to have an informed understanding of your SLA.

Beyond the Guarantee: Contributors to High Uptime

The uptime guarantee is an important factor in helping choose the right WordPress site hosting service, but there are other features to look for. The provider should be offering a reliable data center with server infrastructure that is optimized for WordPress sites. It should offer a variety of monitoring and maintenance services beyond uptime monitoring, including regular backups, performance optimization like caching configuration, security services like malware scanning, ongoing WordPress updates, and technical support for website-related issues. Finally, automated scalability should be offered to handle traffic spikes.

Investing in Your WordPress Website’s Ongoing Success

There is a wide range of significant costs associated with your WordPress website’s downtime—some tangible, like lost revenue, and some intangible, like damage to your business’s reputation and its brand.

With so much riding on the availability of your website, it’s important that your provider offers a strong uptime guarantee and reliable infrastructure. Investing in a hosting service provider that offers a clear, realistic uptime guarantee will go a long way toward supporting greater longevity and success with your business’s WordPress website.

Pressable Offers Enterprise-Level WordPress Hosting

If you have dealt with unacceptable downtime problems with previous hosting providers, look no further. Pressable offers 100% guaranteed uptime, excluding scheduled maintenance. Flexible, fast, low-maintenance, secure—Pressable offers stellar WordPress hosting services, including automated backup and proactive performance monitoring. Hand off hosting to our experts who thoroughly understand WordPress.

Pressable—part of the Automattic family that also includes WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and WooCommerce—offers experts with the skills and knowledge to effectively manage your WordPress site. If you’re thinking about switching to managed enterprise WordPress hosting, schedule a demo to see how Pressable can support your continued growth.