The four most common reasons why websites are unavailable

When websites are unavailable, it is important to be informed about it. That is clear. Otherwise website monitoring tools like koality.io would not be so would not be so popular. The easiest way to check if a website is available is something we have already discussed in detail. But what are the reasons why a website is not reachable for the customer? We have summarized the most common ones.

New features

The most common reason why a website is unavailable is new features that have page effects. Clearly. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. That's perfectly OK, too, because it can be planned. We have a new release, we assume we break something, we look it up afterwards, fix it quickly, and we're done. Of course, it's best to have functional tests that automate the whole thing. Otherwise, the least you should do is to go through the most important features once manually.

Plugin update

Not only own features are extended, but also plugins that one uses. In a world of Shopware, Magento, Wordpress or Typo3 almost every problem has already been solved and packed into an extension. So if you do it right, you have a lot of these plugins in use. For security reasons alone, these plugins need to be kept up to date. After all, depending on how invasive they are, the whole system can be damaged here as well.

In this case, there are two things to keep in mind. First, after the update again automated or manually to try out the most important features. Secondly, there must be a defined process for updating plugins. Since updating extensions is very easy, you have to be careful that it is not just done by anyone at any time. So always let them know beforehand and do it deliberately.

Google Tag Manager or similar

From a monitoring software vendor's point of view, Google Tag Manager is a godsend. Why? All of a sudden, bugs are no longer attached to deployments, but can occur at any time. Anyone with access to the Google tool can also publish new JavaScript snippets. And yes, shoot down the page with it, too. The freedom you get from the tool comes with the risk of generating new bugs.

Server problems

Also a classic: the server causes problems. The developed software is not always the cause of failures, because the hardware can also throw a wrench in your plans when it comes to accessibility. The stupid thing here is the unpredictability of server failures. And the timing. But what leads to such a server failure. Usually, there are two main causes here as well: 1. the data center has problems, 2. your servers have problems.

In case of the first cause there is almost nothing you can do (except redundant setup). In this case you should inform your customers that you will be back soon. Unfortunately, such failures cannot be predicted. At least not by you.

The second cause, your servers are down, is even worse. This happens mostly when you don't need it, when the servers are under load. And these are the moments when you are successful. Many users and many transactions can either load the CPU and memory so much that everything becomes slow or the servers close and don't let anyone connect anymore. All stupid, especially because you have just done something that should bring you money.

koality.io for accessibility monitoring

It's important to understand that websites and services can always go down and you don't always have it under control. It is then a matter of reacting quickly. As soon as it's in your hands, it's time for bugfixing. koality.io is the service that helps you to detect such failures as fast as possible. The following features help:

• Monitoring of accessibility
• Monitoring of JavaScript errors
• Crawling of 500 subpages to check after a deployment
• Measuring performance and alerting on slow pages