Table of contents

• When bottlenecks come to the fore
• Heavy traffic
• Broken code
• Plugin errors
• Third-party failures
• Bad deployment practices

When bottlenecks come to the fore

Common bottlenecks include payment gateways, performance-intensive features, database calls, and synchronous processes. Under normal circumstances, these bottlenecks should easily accommodate traffic. However, traffic to business sites isn’t always normal. It can spike due to a major sale, a product drop or launch, or if it’s peak season. A sudden visitor surge can overwhelm a website if it’s unoptimized for heavy traffic. As a result, the site crashes.

According to 2025 data, 91% of businesses report downtime costs of $300,000+ per hour. Two-thirds of potential customers leave a site that takes more than six seconds to load, and 60% of customers who encounter an error are unlikely to return to a site.

Heavy traffic

A website might go from zero to 1,000 calls in one second. When this happens, the cache doesn’t have time to load, leading to an overloaded backend, and visitors will definitely encounter errors. 

The number of visitors can increase from 20,000 to as many as 180,000 in a few hours during the holiday season, which explains the high frequency of website crashes at this time of year.

These may be extreme examples, but inadequate load balancing often leads to crashes. Your web hosting plan typically determines your bandwidth. When choosing a plan, look for one with sufficient bandwidth to ensure your site is always available. Cheaper plans usually have low bandwidth limits, leading to frequent crashes.

Broken code

Developers write and deploy code to give a website functions and a user interface. Your code is probably broken if you recently made changes to your business website. Even minor typos can break code easily. Websites crash unless each line of code is perfect. Parts of code lines visible on your website indicate the code is broken.

Websites must use a staging environment to test changes before they go live to avoid broken code. The staging environment and the website are identical, and you can check all the links and functions as if the site were live.

Plugin errors

Plugins add more features, functions, and code to a website. They can perform simple functions like adding a contact form or a calendar. Content management systems such as WordPress offer a myriad of plugins, some of which have been created by reputable companies or developers. Others haven’t, but even amazing reviews are no guarantee the product will run unproblematically. Although plugins work independently, they can still interfere with one another.

They need regular updates to remain on par with new standards or security patches. If the update is not carried out, the website can crash due to a broken plugin. Websites should perform daily backups and use testing environments to stay online. Remove any plugins that you’re no longer using.

Third-party failures

Reliance on third parties like payment processors means your website crashes if they fail. Your customers cannot complete their transactions if a payment gateway goes offline. They become frustrated, and the business loses potential revenue. A business website should always be equipped with backup solutions such as cached data or an alternative payment method, making sure that the website remains online despite failing external services.

Bad deployment

Bad deployment contributes to website instability, especially if updates or new features are not properly tested before going live. Failing to implement rollback mechanisms means that if an update causes issues, it can be difficult to restore the stable version quickly. To avoid these problems, businesses should employ version control systems. CI/CD pipelines can also help automate testing and minimize the risks of human error.