What The Facebook Outage Teaches Us About Our WordPress Website

No website is infallible, and even the great Facebook can take a knock from time to time. On July 3rd, millions of users across the world experienced issues with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp that seemed to affect images. For those brief hours where every technician who could work on the problem worked on the problem, users felt a sense of disconnection. For netizens, it seemed impossible that the third most visited site in the world could go down, which highlights the importance of maintaining your WordPress site.

Manage Expectations When You Do Go Down

In June, websites on the WordPress VIP Go platform experienced downtime and for WordPress users, this meant site visits and potential sales. One of the best ways to make light of a bad situation is to inform subscribers or followers on other platforms that the site is experiencing downtime. A social media post or quick email will mitigate some of the fallout and hopefully see site visitors come back. While it’s not always possible to update the error message before downtime, a standardized messaged that displays site contact info might help.

Hosting Plays An Important Role

The shared experience of Facebook’s downtime allowed for a fair amount of humor to creep in, with snarky comments and humorous memes making the rounds. Meme topics that enjoyed a fair amount of sharing the following day were those that depicted computer users blaming their WiFi for the downtime. For site owners, there is usually a series of events that take place when their site goes down. They’ll check their connection and when that is fine, they’ll check with the host to find out whether there is any downtime on the server. Site owners who experience regular outages on their site should check with their host to find out whether they are due for an upgrade based on site visits or the size of the site. JavaPipe recommends users compare the various WordPress hosting packages to find an option that will suit their needs.

WordPress Works Hard To Keep Site Owners Happy

While we know that outages are possible and backups are a necessity to keep afloat, that doesn’t mean that WordPress leaves the entire burden of responsibility on the website owner. Just recently, they acquired digital experience platform Flywheel to wow their users. The strategy behind this purchase is to provide users with a chance to experience a better system behind the creation and workflow of their site. While WordPress is fairly tight-lipped about the cost of the acquisition, they do admit that the purchase is the largest one yet for the company. For WordPress, this is a means to grow their operations even further and with just over a quarter of the websites globally making use of the platform, a boost to the $132 million in recurring revenue is on the cards.

WordPress provides a simplified solution to building and maintaining a website, and although there are measures in place to manage user expectations, no site is infallible.