Author: Dr. Manus Ward │Head of Digital Strategy and Data Protection │Hotelconsultant.com is a qualified and experienced former hotel manager, culinary Olympic team manager and hospitality Head of School who is passionate about passing on the knowledge he gained from one of the few hotel digital strategy doctorates in the world to you the hotelier. Bonus: If you have any problems with this contact me (100% free) at manus@hotelconsultant.com or 086 8185829 on this or any aspect of your hotel’s digital strategy.
Why do we need to do this
Google believes that high quality websites are up or live almost all of the time and are immediately fixed if they do happen to go down.
What does this mean
Site uptime is the amount of time your site is live to the world or essentially accessible to your potential guests. If your site is down you are potentially losing out on revenue as well as sending out a bad signal about the quality of your hotel. Google therefore believe that better quality websites are always up. Google have stated that the maximum amount of time a site could be down before Google would lower it in the rankings is only about one day.
What do I do: Monitor your site so that if it is down you contact the host and get it back up as soon as possible. This is more than likely in your contract and the more reputable hosts will have your site back up before you even realise it is down. The following is a free site that will email you if your site is down. It will take a few minutes to set up but once it is set up you never need to do anything ever again. Click on http://uptimerobot.com/ and do the following:
Put in your Name, email, password and tick as follows.
You will then need to check your emails and click here.
On this screen click here.
On the next screen click as follows.
Then click as follows.
You want to see the following.
You want to see this.
Hey this is a lot of work, will I have to do this again. No you will receive an email like this one informing you your site is down.
You will also receive an email telling you your site is back up.
If your site ever goes down you will be informed but if you ever want to check your site uptime statistics just for self reassurance, click on http://uptimerobot.com/ and click on “Dashboard and you are straight into the monitor page with nothing else to do.
More by Dr. Manus Ward
