As May draws to a close, it’s that time again to share with you the most surprising websites that went down this month. Now, I don’t like to “out” anyone but I do like to use these to emphasise that website downtime can affect any website, big or small. And ultimately, the impact is the same – potential customers gone elsewhere, higher bounce rate, lower SEO, and worst of all, lost revenue.

Have you ever wondered why your bounce rate is always over 70% and can never quite figure out why? Your content reads great, you’ve got top-notch videos of your products, and you’ve even got a testimonial from Microsoft saying how good your company is! Well, all of these things seem to have little impact on visitors to your website if you have a) constant pop-ups or b) slow page loading speed (and if you have both, I’d disable Google Analytics now…).

Unplanned downtime is the hardest situation to prepare for as it could happen at any time. The only way that you can plan for that eventuality is by having a website monitoring solution in place that can alert you as soon as your website goes down. If you’re the first to know, then it makes it easier for you to do something about it before your customers start reacting, especially on social media.

As we are all well aware, this month Google will be updating its algorithm with the aim of improving the user experience. With these changes, however, it’s reported that many of the top-ranking websites will be affected, meaning they need to take action now to ensure all of the hard SEO work they’ve done is not lost.