Understanding the causes of website crashes is crucial, especially for site owners.
When a website crashes, data transmission and reception are interrupted, rendering the site inaccessible. This problem could damage your company’s reputation and even cost you money.
Fortunately, there are numerous approaches to correct and avoid this mistake. This article will cover the causes of website crashes, fixes for them, and 10 ways to avoid them.
6 Frequent Causes of Website Crashes
Without further ado, here are the most frequent causes of website crashes:
1. Code Errors
To create a website’s interface and functionality, web developers write code. A set of instructions that must have every letter, space, and symbol in the appropriate place are written in a programming language.
Therefore, a mistake in your code could result in a website crash. To prevent this, make sure each change is verified twice before publishing it. Check the newly added code before checking any text, videos, or images for errors.
Finding the cause and the code that caused the problem to occur are the only ways to resolve it.
2. Update Problems
Older websites may have bugs and security flaws. Installing updates that are incompatible with the website, on the other hand, can also result in software conflicts and cause your site to crash.
3. Traffic Issues
A website crash could happen if your server experiences unexpected spikes in traffic. This is due to the possibility that your server’s resources, such as RAM and bandwidth, won’t be able to handle the surge. The website will display the HTTP 503 error message in such circumstances.
Traffic accidents frequently happen during holidays or promotional events. It’s best to upgrade your hosting solution to avoid this. We advise users of shared hosting to switch to a cloud hosting package that distributes data across multiple servers for load balancing. As a result, even if one server is unavailable, your website will still function properly.
The appearance of abnormal traffic spikes, however, may point to a cyberattack like a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS). Stop running processes and think about utilizing a CDN like Cloudflare to detect and prevent DDoS.
4. Malware
Malicious activities like malware infections can bring down your website. While the motivations can vary, one of the most common ones is financial gain.
Malware can originate from a number of places, including software flaws, third-party integrations, and cross-site contamination.
Security features like an antivirus program, a malware scanner, and malware removal are typically included with dependable hosting services. Additionally, keep in mind to use a stronger password moving forward that includes letters, numbers, and special characters.
5. Your Domain has Expired
Despite the fact that an expired domain name doesn’t technically bring down a website, it can have issues with the DNS. Despite being distinct from web hosting, domain hosting is still an essential component of a website.
If it runs out of time, users won’t be able to access your website by entering its domain name into their browsers, which will decrease traffic. Additionally, if someone registers your domain, you will lose it.
We advise renewing the expired domain because of this. Some hosting companies provide an automatic renewal option that re-registers the domain name for the same period.
6. Hosting Issues
If the website is unavailable and you have not recently changed any of the code, the hosting company may be at fault. The issues could range from cyberattacks or planned maintenance.
Being powerless to fix a hosting provider error can be frustrating. Customers are typically informed via email or account notification, and they are asked to wait while the team fixes it.
If it happens frequently, we advise switching to a dependable host like ASPHostPortal, which guarantees a minimum uptime of 99.9%.
Tips to Avoid Website Crashes
The following guidelines should be regularly followed to prevent website crashes:
1. Keep Your Website Updated
In order to maintain the website’s functionality, make sure to update it frequently. You shouldn’t perform updates during busy times; instead, pick a suitable time. Create a maintenance schedule as well as notify your customers in advance.
2. Close Code Tags
Not including closing tags can result in browser incompatibilities because some programming languages demand them. Additionally, using them makes it simpler to sort through the script sequence when inspecting a page.
Closing tags also stop web developers from writing erroneous code and becoming overwhelmed. Additionally, they aid in the accurate rendering of web pages by browsers.
3. Incorporate Notes Outlining the Code
The behavior of the system won’t change if you add notes or comments to the site’s source code. Instead, they make the text easier to read and make it easier to move between sections. It is simpler for developers to comprehend how the entire structure functions when each code section’s function is described.
A warning note on a crucial code line will stop unauthorized changes that might damage the system. Another risk-free way to experiment that enables you to try out various approaches to the code is by writing comments.
4. Test new updates on a regular basis
Testing new updates is crucial to preventing website crashes. To determine whether the most recent version is reliable or compatible with the site, we advise using a staging environment. By doing this, you can avoid making the changes on the live website. As a result, it cannot crash.
Deploy the updated version online once the staging website is operational following the updates.
5. Test Site Links
When crawling your website, search engines like Google take links into consideration. Because of this, relevant site links can raise your profile and increase traffic.
Verify each link on your website to make sure there are no broken redirects or HTTP errors. This enhances user experience while assisting in preventing website crashes.
6. Check Browser Compability
In their architecture, websites use a variety of programming languages, including Python and JavaScript. However, because each browser handles these components differently, loading the site may not always be consistent.
Therefore, it is best to perform cross-browser testing to ensure that your website is displayed correctly across all browsers. These tests can be executed either manually or automatically. Simply access the website using another browser, such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, if you are using the former.
Use an automated cross-browser testing tool like Testsigma for the latter.
7. Run Speed Tests
The performance of the website can be tracked and areas for improvement identified by running website speed tests. They compute a number of variables, including execution speed, page load time, and parse time.
These tests can be run using a variety of online tools, such as GTmetrix. The majority of them also offer comprehensive suggestions for website optimization. By doing this, you can maintain a fast page speed while preventing website crashes.
8. Force HTTPS
The communication between a browser and a website is not secure using HTTP. By inserting malware or fake advertisements on your pages, malicious intruders may attempt to hack websites. Every resource that moves over the connection, including images, scripts, and cookies, can be used by them.
When a website is using HTTPS, browser and website communications are encrypted using a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. It guards users’ private information and stops attackers from tampering with or hijacking the connection.
9. Use CDN
A group of servers dispersed across different locations known as a content delivery network (CDN) is used to accelerate the transmission of web content. In proxy servers close to your location, it caches JavaScript files, HTML pages, images, videos, and stylesheets. Additionally, it shortens page load times and lowers bounce rates.
A CDN can enhance website performance in addition to preventing website crashes. These are some additional advantages:
- Narrow the bandwidth. The amount of data that an origin server must provide can be reduced with a CDN, lowering hosting costs.
- Boost the availability and redundancy of the content. Using its load balancing feature, a CDN can manage an unexpected increase in traffic while lightening the burden on web servers. Additionally, in order to maintain service even if one of its servers is down, the ones that are online will take over.
- Boost the security of websites. DDoS is a malicious attack that floods a website with a lot of fictitious traffic. By distributing the load among other servers, a CDN can manage a significant traffic spike while lessening the impact on the origin server.
Conclusion
When a website crashes, the data cannot be loaded, leaving you with either a blank screen or an error message with a status code. It could happen for a number of reasons, such as bad code, plugin problems, update problems, or heavy traffic.
When your website crashes, be sure to take the appropriate steps to identify the cause, mitigate the harm, inform the users, and correct the problem.
Keep in mind that the problem can be avoided if you keep your website updated, test new releases in a staging environment, run cross-browser tests, and enforce HTTPS.
We trust that this article has given you the knowledge you need to handle website crashes effectively and avoid them altogether.
Yury Sobolev is Full Stack Software Developer by passion and profession working on Microsoft ASP.NET Core. Also he has hands-on experience on working with Angular, Backbone, React, ASP.NET Core Web API, Restful Web Services, WCF, SQL Server.
