Ecommerce Disaster Recovery Plan
Always prepare for the worst
What would you do if your ecommerce website stopped taking sales?
When your site is working well, it is a great feeling to see the sales rolling in every day. However there is always the risk that the unthinkable can happen. The smallest code conflict could result in your checkout not working or even bigger issues such as your entire site going down for long periods of time.
You may need to fall back onto a disaster recovery plan in times such as:
- Site security being compromised
- Server downtime
- Checkout not working
- Couriers on strike
Read on below to see why I think every ecommerce business should have some form of recovery plan to get your business back up and running and gain access to my free ecommerce disaster recovery plan.
What Are The Benefits Of Having A Disaster Recovery Plan?
1. Financial Loss Implications
First and foremost, ask yourself, could you afford your online store to go down for a sustained period of time? What is the longest period you could afford to not take sales for and how could you negate these losses? The longer your business is not able to shift products, the more you put yourself at risk.
2.Staff Are Able To Act Quickly To Put a Plan In Place
The larger your ecommerce team, the harder it is to co-ordinate a change in daily operations when they are unware what those changes may entail. Having a document that they are familiar with, especially ahead of key busy periods such as Black Friday in retail, give the business every opportunity of getting some form of solution in place as quickly as possible. The last thing you need is to have all of your team sitting around doing nothing, costing your business more money when they could be implementing a solution to get you back online.
3. Retain Your Customer Base
If your site goes down and you still have traffic coming in from various marketing channels, they are going to hit a 404 page and potentially go looking for a competitor to get the product they want. Additionally you do not want to be wasting money on new customer acquisition coming in via PPC or social advertising who have never heard of your business and the first impression is a dead page.
4. Be Aware Of Search Engine Ranking Implications
When a site or group of pages are down for a prolonged period of time you run the risk of Google crawling your site and seeing broken pages. You may get away with it on the first crawl but as it comes along and continually sees pages that are not functioning, it will likely begin to drop your site in the search engine rankings. Remember, Google’s primary aim is to serve the customer the best experience possible, so dead pages in their search engine ranking pages are a really bad sign that it will not be too forgiving about.
Free Ecommerce Disaster Recovery Document
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