Website outages are an inevitable part of running online services, but proactive preparation can make all the difference in how an agency and its clients weather the storm. For digital agencies managing multiple client websites, even a brief downtime incident can carry steep costs – from lost revenue and productivity to a damaged reputation. In fact, industry research by Gartner estimates the average cost of IT downtime at around $5,600 per minute. With so much at stake, downtime preparedness is not optional; it’s a critical business function. This article (Part 1 of a three-part series) explores how agencies can plan ahead for website outages, covering everything from incident response playbooks and monitoring tools to staff training, backups, and predefined roles. By laying this groundwork, agencies can respond to incidents swiftly and confidently, minimising impact on clients.

Understanding the Stakes of Downtime

When a client’s website goes dark unexpectedly, the clock starts ticking. E-commerce transactions halt, users encounter errors, and client anxiety soars. Poorly handled downtime can erode trust and send clients looking for other partners. That’s why agency incident planning begins with recognising the high stakes. Studies have shown that unplanned outages don’t just inconvenience customers – they can lead to substantial financial losses and reduced productivity across the board. Beyond the immediate losses, frequent downtime can tarnish an agency’s reliability record and harm its brand. Clients may begin to doubt whether their websites are in safe hands. In short, the cost of being unprepared for outages far exceeds the investment in preparation. Agencies that plan for incidents in advance demonstrate professionalism and commitment to uptime – key factors in retaining client confidence when things go wrong.

Agency Incident Planning: Playbooks and Predefined Roles

One of the most effective ways to prepare for outages is to create a formal incident response playbook. This is a document that spells out, step by step, what the team should do when a website goes down. A good playbook defines roles, processes, and communication flows before an incident ever occurs, so that during a crisis everyone knows their job. There doesn’t need to be a massive data centre fire or DDoS attack to trigger the plan – even “smaller” problems like a buggy update or a server glitch warrant a coordinated response.

Key elements of an incident response plan include:

Agencies that develop these playbooks and run through them with their team (in drills or tabletop exercises) will find that actual incidents unfold much more smoothly. Regular practice is important – it helps staff become familiar with the procedures and reveals any gaps or outdated steps in the plan. Consider conducting periodic incident response drills where a hypothetical outage scenario is walked through, roles are practiced, and lessons learned are recorded. In fact, well-prepared teams often hold post-incident review meetings to update the playbook with any improvements identified (more on that in Part 3 of this series).

Website Monitoring and Uptime Alerts

Preparation isn’t only about process – it’s also about having the right tools in place. Chief among these are website monitoring and uptime alerting tools. The sooner you know about a website outage, the faster you can respond. Relying on a panicked phone call from a client to discover downtime is clearly less than ideal. That’s why savvy agencies set up 24/7 monitoring for all client sites and key services.

A good monitoring service will regularly check if a website is up and functioning, and immediately trigger a downtime alert if something goes wrong. Typically, these tools can send alerts via multiple channels – email, SMS/text, phone calls, or integration into team chat apps – to ensure the on-call staff are notified instantly, day or night. For example, our own product Metrics+ is an uptime monitoring platform that agencies use to receive real-time alerts the moment a site becomes unreachable. By configuring uptime checks (pinging the site or performing a page content check) at short intervals, Metrics+ or similar services can detect an outage within a minute or two and broadcast an alert to the team. This early warning system is absolutely vital: it buys you precious time to start diagnosing and fixing the issue before too many users are impacted.

When implementing website monitoring, consider a multi-layered approach. At minimum, have a basic HTTP/HTTPS check to see if the site is responding. For more complex client sites, you might set up specific checks for critical pages or transactions (for instance, a login page or checkout workflow) to ensure all essential functions are operational. Some agencies also monitor backend endpoints or third-party integrations if those could affect site functionality. The goal is to get a comprehensive picture – if anything essential fails, an alert should fire.

Equally important is ensuring alerts reach the right people at the right time. Define an on-call rotation within your team so that someone is always designated to react to after-hours alerts. Many monitoring tools (Metrics+ included) support on-call schedules and escalation policies – for example, if the primary on-call person doesn’t acknowledge the alert within a few minutes, it escalates to a secondary contact. This guarantees that alerts won’t be missed. Nothing undermines an incident response plan faster than an alert that no one sees until hours later.

Finally, regularly test your monitoring setup. It’s a good practice to simulate downtime (perhaps by pointing a monitoring check to a test URL that you deliberately bring offline) to verify that alerts fire and the team’s contact methods are working. You don’t want the first real outage to reveal a misconfigured alert rule or an outdated phone number on the contact list.

Downtime Preparedness with Backups and Redundancies

While monitoring and plans address detection and process, another pillar of outage preparedness is infrastructure resiliency – namely backups and redundancy. You can’t always prevent an outage, but you can control how quickly you recover from one. Robust data backups and fallback systems ensure that even if something goes terribly wrong, you can restore service in short order.

Start with a solid backup strategy for each client’s website. This typically includes regular backups of the website’s code, databases, and any user-generated content. Many agencies leverage automated backup solutions provided by hosting platforms or control panel software (e.g. scheduled backups via cPanel/WHM or similar). The key points to consider are:

In addition to data backups, consider redundancy and failover options for critical websites. Redundancy means having a Plan B for hosting the site if the primary environment fails. For instance, you might maintain a secondary “hot” server or a standby instance of the site that can be switched on if needed. In cloud hosting setups, this could involve running the site in multiple availability zones or having a containerised deployment that can be redeployed on another cluster quickly. For agencies using managed hosting providers, check if they offer an automatic failover or high-availability configuration – and use it for high-importance client sites.

Of course, full high-availability architecture may be beyond the budget or needs of many basic marketing websites. At minimum, though, you can prepare some simpler fallback measures. For example, some agencies create a static emergency page (a simple HTML page possibly saying “We’re undergoing maintenance, please check back soon”) that can be served if the main site is down. If you have access to DNS settings or a content delivery network (CDN), you could swap to this static page during a prolonged outage. In a more advanced setup, a load balancer might automatically direct traffic to a standby page if it detects the primary servers are down. While it’s not as ideal as full availability, showing a friendly error or status page is far better than users encountering a browser error or blank screen. Just be sure any such error page is neutral and not inadvertently advertising the outage – for instance, avoid putting your agency’s branding all over it, which could embarrass the client. The focus should be on informing the client’s visitors that the site is experiencing issues and that a fix is underway.

In summary, backups and redundancy planning determine how quickly you can restore service when an outage occurs. They are your safety net. An agency prepared with recent backups and a failover plan might turn what could have been a multi-hour outage into a brief hiccup that’s resolved in minutes. That resilience not only saves your clients from extended downtime but also showcases your agency’s competence in crisis management.

Even the best plan or technology will falter if the people involved are not prepared. That’s why staff training is a crucial component of outage readiness. Everyone on the team – from developers and sysadmins to account managers – should know there is an incident response process and understand their role in it. Introduce the incident playbook to new team members as part of onboarding, and ensure all relevant staff can access the latest version easily (e.g. in an internal knowledge base or runbook repository).

One effective approach is to designate a core incident response team (even if it’s a small team, or in very small agencies, maybe it’s essentially everyone). Make sure this team is trained on the tools you use (monitoring dashboards, server consoles, etc.) and is familiar with the communication protocols. Regular team meetings or review sessions can help keep everyone sharp. For example, you might meet quarterly to review the incident response procedure, discuss any industry best practices updates, or walk through a hypothetical scenario. The goal is to foster a culture of readiness – your team shouldn’t be figuring out how to use the paging system or who’s in charge during an outage; those should be second nature due to prior training.

Conducting incident response drills or simulations is especially valuable. In a drill, you simulate a realistic outage scenario and have the team go through the motions of detection, escalation, communication, and recovery (often without actually taking any site offline – it can be done as a tabletop exercise). This can be as simple as saying “It’s 3pm, Client X’s e-commerce site database just crashed – go!” and then observing how the team proceeds. These exercises train staff to respond quickly and cooperatively under pressure, and they often highlight gaps or ambiguities in your plan that can be corrected. Experts recommend running such exercises at least annually (if not more frequently) to keep the team’s skills fresh. Even a brief review of “what would we do if Server Y went down right now?” during a team meeting can be enlightening.

Another aspect of training is ensuring backup personnel for key roles. Outages don’t always happen at convenient times or when all the right people are available. Staff take holidays, get sick, or might simply be offline when an incident strikes. Part of preparedness is cross-training team members so that someone can step in if the primary person for a role (say, the Incident Commander or the database specialist) is unreachable. Maintaining an up-to-date contact list with multiple ways to reach each person (phone, text, email) and designated alternates for critical roles will save precious minutes in mobilising a response. As noted earlier, your communication plan should include backup contacts for each role or client in case the main contact is unavailable.

Finally, encourage a mindset that values preparedness. Leadership should stress that investing time in readiness is a priority, not an afterthought. Celebrate successful handling of minor incidents as learning opportunities. When team members see that smoothly managing an outage is considered a win (as opposed to just firefighting), they’ll be more engaged in preparation efforts. This mindset will pay off the next time things go sideways at 2 AM – your team will respond like a well-oiled machine, rather than headless chickens.

In the fast-moving agency environment, it’s tempting to focus on delivering new websites and features and hope that outages won’t happen. But hope is not a strategy. Agencies that invest in outage preparedness – through planning, tools like monitoring and backups, and team training – are ultimately protecting both their clients and themselves. With a solid incident response playbook and infrastructure safeguards in place, an outage becomes a manageable IT issue rather than a full-blown crisis. Your clients will thank you for it, perhaps not explicitly, but through their continued trust and business. They might not see all the behind-the-scenes work you’ve done to be ready for the worst, but they will certainly feel the difference in how quickly and transparently you handle any downtime.

Part of that behind-the-scenes arsenal is having the right software support. For instance, Metrics+ plays a quiet yet crucial role in many agencies’ preparedness plans by providing reliable website monitoring, instant uptime alerts, and historical reports. Incorporating such a tool ensures that no outage goes unnoticed and that your team can spring into action at a moment’s notice. It’s a small investment that can save a lot of pain.

In the next instalment of this series, we will move from preparation to action: How Agencies Respond to Website Outages in Real Time (Part 2). We’ll explore the moment-by-moment tactics of incident response – what to do when the alerts start ringing – including triaging the problem, communicating during the crisis, and restoring service as fast as possible. With the groundwork laid by preparation, you’ll be ready to tackle whatever comes next. Stay tuned!