The Real Cost of Website Downtime
Downtime costs more than lost sales. It erodes trust, hurts SEO, and damages your reputation. Here's what's actually at stake.
It's not just lost revenue
When people talk about downtime costs, they jump straight to revenue. And sure, if you're running a store, every minute of downtime is money you're not making.
But the real damage runs deeper. A visitor who hits an error page doesn't bookmark you and try again tomorrow. They go somewhere else. Do it twice and they're gone for good.
The SEO hit
Google crawls your site regularly. If the crawler hits a 500 error or a timeout, it takes note. Repeated failures signal an unreliable site, and Google has said directly that persistent server errors can lead to pages being dropped from their index.
That's not speculation — it's in their documentation on HTTP status codes and crawling. And once you've lost ranking, rebuilding takes months of consistent uptime.
Customer trust is fragile
Trust is slow to build and fast to lose. New visitors who hit downtime have zero reason to come back. Existing customers start browsing alternatives.
This is especially brutal for SaaS. Every outage plants a seed of doubt. Even if your product is genuinely better, the competitor that's always available looks more reliable. Perception wins.
The hidden cost: your time
Without monitoring, you find out about downtime from angry users. Now you're context-switching, firefighting, and apologizing all at once.
With monitoring, you know in seconds. Often you can fix things before anyone notices. The stress difference alone is worth it.
Just monitor the thing
Setup takes a minute. Costs less than a coffee per month. The alternative is discovering problems hours late and spending your evening writing apologies.
Not complicated math.