January 8, 2016
In this article I'm giving you my tips about how to set customer expectations post launching your website.
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Definitely get Google Analytics installed on your website. It's a free statistical tool which Google provides on which they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing. It will start to give you information about how your website is performing, and how your customers are interacting with the site, and it can give you some very granular data about what search keywords people are using when they land on your website. For example, how long your customers are staying on the website, which pages they land on, which pages they leave from and how many of those visitors convert to paying customers.
A major part of having a website isn't just about getting the website live. A common mistake is that when a website goes live all of a sudden it drives loads of traffic and queries to your site and you become an overnight millionaire through all of the products you sell. That’s not the case. Launching a website is a very organic process, and it goes through several stages, it's going through a continual state of improvement.
What I recommend you do is regularly, quarterly or every six months, go and have a look at your Google Analytics and see how people are interacting with your site. It might be that customers are getting to the contact form but you haven't had any inquiries for several months. This would suggest that there's a bug in the system and it's simply not sending those inquiries through to you. Google Analytics is a very quick way of seeing where your site's failing, and how you might be able to improve it.
Check with your web developer whether they've got a site launch checklist which they work from whenever they launch a new website. There is one in my book, which you can get a copy of from Amazon, or you're welcome to email me, and I'll send you a copy of our site launch checklist.
When the site goes live, we run the site through a whole gamut of testing tools. We check whether:
We check all of the different individual pages on the websites. We go through the checklist, it's about two or three pages long, one step at a time. It means that the moment the site goes live, we're then confident we're going to pick up any problems with it immediately. It's very unlikely you're going to launch a website and it's going to be perfect first time round. At the very least if there are problems on your site, using a checklist means you can just run through it, find any problems and fix them immediately.
It is quite normal for bugs to appear once the site is live. You'd be surprised the amount of clients we've had who've come back really angry because something's not working quite as they had expected. These are normally tiny, trivial little things that can be fixed really, really quickly, but to the customer, to the business owner, these are really, really important.
I'd ask any web designers or developers, who are reading this, to just bear that in mind, and be very conscious of the level of importance of these errors appear to your clients.
As a customer I would ask your web developer for a copy of their service level agreement. This is something you should have done before your web designer starts work. A service level agreement outlines the level of support and service you're going to get once your website has gone live.
In our industry we use three, four, or five “nines” as a way of gauging what service level of support we're going to give to our clients. As an example; three nine's is a 99.9% uptime guarantee. That's probably the most common SLA across the board for our industry. What that means is there is potential for up to 8.76 hours downtime per year, 43.8 minutes downtime per month, and 10 minutes downtime per day.
10 minutes a day sounds like it's quite a lot, but what this means is the server, which your website is running on, might require security updates or patches to be run. Your technical support guys are going to be doing that at 2 o'clock in the morning, so it's unlikely it will impact many, if any of your customers at all. It can take up to five, 10 minutes for a server to reboot and for everything to come back online. Most security patches, especially Windows-based servers, require a reboot. I am sure you would rather have your site hosted on a secure server rather than your website getting hacked and you having lots of data stolen. These periods of downtime are sometimes a necessity.
Then you go up to five nines, which is a 99.999% uptime guarantee, which allows for 5.2 minutes downtime per year, which equates to only six seconds downtime per day, which means that they might be doing batches of updates on a monthly basis, for example, to minimize any downtime,
This might be if your website is getting thousands of visitors a day, then doing a daily update could have a significant impact on your business. A 10 minute downtime could equate to lost sales potential or lost custom. It's key to remember that your website will experience some downtime at some point.
Now, again, you have to be very conscious as a web designer that this affects your customer's business. Sometimes a server just has to be rebooted. Not necessarily if there is a problem, but for a security patch to be applied or to kickstart a failed database. These server reboots should happen out of normal office hours and your web designer should make sure that a) you're given notice upfront when these are going to happen, and b) that it happens at the time when it's going to have least impact on your business.
Cloud-based hosting solutions have the best form of resilience because a cloud-based website will be hosted on a number of different servers, which might be having updates at different times, so you experience no downtime at all.
It can become expensive if you look at the likes of Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services. However if you're looking for a certain level of resilience, that your website is just up all the time, if you've got tens of thousands of visitors travelling to your site every month, then you want to go for a cloud-based solution such as Azure or AWS.
Finally, look into something called a Content Distribution Network (CDN). A content distribution network caches or stores static files like images, and JavaScript files, and stylesheets, across a number of different servers throughout the world. When a web page on your website is called, it chooses the nearest server to wherever the user is accessing your website to download those static resources.
This reduces the load on your own web server and, secondly, it improves the experience for the end-user. Thirdly, CDNs have an infrastructure or layer of security which sits between the user and your website hosting platform, to prevent denial-of-service attacks, and people trying to hack into your website.
CDNs are really, really important to make sure that your site performance is as optimal as it possibly can be.
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