The (Not-So-Magnificent) 7 HTTPS Errors that Infuriate Customers and Ruin Reputations

by Louis Kingston

In the classic flick The Magnificent Seven, a pack of essentially decent but “don’t you dare park your horse in my spot or else you’ll get your spurs blasted” gunslingers come together to rid a village of some nasty bandits. There’s action. There’s drama. There’s tragedy. There’s humor. There’s romance. There’s Steve freakin’ McQueen. What’s not to love?

Well, on the dusty and dangerous internet landscape, instead of a magnificent seven to save the day, there exists seven not-so-magnificent HTTPS errors that are impossible to like, let alone love. Why? Because their purpose is to block visitors from reaching websites — which leads to lost customers and wrecked reputations.

Here’s a look at the reprehensible HTTPS errors that have their picture on Most Wanted Lists in every post office from Tombstone to Dodge City:

403 Forbidden: The 403 Forbidden error means that the server is absolutely refusing — no ifs, ands or buts — to grant permission to access a resource, despite the fact that a request is valid. Common causes include missing index files, and incorrect .htaccess configuration.

404 Not Found: The 404 Not Found error means that a web page or other resource can’t be found because they simply don’t exist. Common reasons for this include a broken link, mistyped URL, or that someone moved or deleted a page and didn’t update the server (which happens a lot).

408 Request Time Out: The 408 Request Time Out error means that the server can’t find the target or resource that it’s searching for, and after a while, just throws in the towel. Often, this is because the server is overloaded.

410 Gone: Whereas (as noted above) a 404 error implies that there might be some hope — i.e. the target file might be somewhere, just not where it’s supposed to be — the 410 Gone error snuffs out any possible optimism. It’s totally, completely and permanently gone.

500 Internal Server Error: The 500 Internal Server Error means that the server cannot process a request for any number of reasons, such as missing packages, misconfiguration, and overload.

503 Service Unavailable: The 503 Service Unavailable error means that the server is either down because of maintenance, or because it’s overloaded. Either way, the server is conjuring up its inner Gandalf and screaming: “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”

504 Gateway Time-Out: The 504 Gateway Time-Out error means that a higher-level upstream server isn’t working and playing well with a lower-level downstream server. After a while, the downstream server gets the message that it’s not wanted, and says “Oh yeah? Well, I don’t need you either!”

Calling in the Marshall
The bad news is that these reprehensible HTTPS errors, if left unchecked, can cause a lot of damage. Indeed, few things irk and offend website visitors more than seeing an error code. But the good news is that you can call in the Marshall— a.k.a. AlertBot — to restore law and order.

AlertBot constantly scans your site’s pages to watch out for these and other HTTP errors. If and when they are detected, authorized employees (e.g. webmasters, sysadmins, etc.) are proactively notified so they can take swift action and fix the problem.

It’s lightening fast, always reliable, and as smooth as Steve McQueen. Dastardly, good-fer-nuthin’ HTTPS errors don’t stand a chance!

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Whether you’re hitting the gym or the trails, you’re likely to be lacing up with some active footwear that helps you burn calories and exercise in comfort and style. When it comes to activewear, there are many companies these days who contribute their accessories and gear to our daily workout regiments, however, two major players come to the front of our minds when it comes to popular footwear brands.

For our latest AlertBot Showdown, we picked frontrunners Nike and Reebok to evaluate the website performance for each athletic wear’s online persona.

We used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites for a couple weeks, spanning from October 1, 2017 to October 22, 2017. While both sporty sites performed well, it became pretty clear after a significant trip-up that one site left the other in the dust.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

For the first time in our experience of tracking sites for a Showdown, one of the sites in the running went down while we were actually in the office. That gave us the ability to watch the event as it unfolded while AlertBot performed its tests against the failing site. Reebok.com hit a snag on October 13 around 3:30pm EST. It took nearly a full hour for their site to recover. We manually checked their site from our desks at 4pm, and the site was still down. We checked again at 4:15 and the site was back up, however, only text was loading – no images. By 4:30pm, when we checked one more time, the Reebok.com was back up in its entirety. It was the only failure event that Reebok.com encountered during the weeks it was tested for this Showdown, but it was definitely a doozy. During this time period, their average downtime was just 99.85%, but it’s proof that “99% uptime” can still contain an hour of critical downtime. And for a retail site, this could truly prove costly. (Reebok 7/10)

On the other hand, Nike.com experienced no significant failure events and only occasionally experienced minor issues like a slow page file or a “timed out” error. From the starting line, Nike is already on the fast track to success between the two brands. (Nike 9.5/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

Speed is everything for the image of brands like these, which makes it a bit ironic that both sites seem to struggle a little in this area. Reebok’s fastest average speed was on October 4^th with 6.4 seconds load time. Their worst average speed was October 23 at 7.9 seconds. They’re not drastically different, but that’s not an impressive load time.  (Reebok 7/10)

At this point, one might expect Nike to sprint past Reebok in the load time category, but Nike didn’t fair much better, with 6.3 seconds being their fastest average speed on October 23 (which is coincidentally the day of Reebok’s slowest average), and Nike’s slowest average speed was 7.5 seconds. Again, they’re not great speeds, but in this case, Nike edges out Reebok, even if it is only by a slight skip rather than a jump. (Nike 7/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

Looking at site response time geographically tells a different story. First off, Reebok shows that they had the fastest load time in Texas with an average of 3.7 seconds. Their second fastest time was in New Jersey at 4.8 seconds. Virginia produced the slowest return, with an average of 6.9 seconds. (Reebok 7.5/10)

Yet again, Nike only performed slightly better, with California showing the fastest average speed of 3.2 seconds and Texas showing the second fastest at 4.5 seconds. However, Nike performed worse than Reebok when it came to slowest location, with Illinois taking the cake for worst average speed, at 9.7 seconds! (Nike 7/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like visiting a site for nutritional information or going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater, or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to add their latest running shoe to the shopping cart and start the checkout process.

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.reebok.com into our Chrome browser and clicking around to find a Men’s Running Shoe, choosing the first one, choosing a size, adding it to the cart and clicking “checkout,” it took 36 seconds. From the homepage, it took 5 clicks to get to the checkout process. At first glance at the homepage of the site, it seemed like it might be a challenge to actually find what we’re looking for, but it was a pretty easy shopping experience.

From the point of typing www.nike.com into our Chrome browser, it took 8 mouse clicks and 48 seconds to find a men’s running shoe and get to the checkout stage. Upon first visiting the site, the visitor is hit with an ultra closeup of a bunch of kids in gray Nike hoodies and it takes most of the page hostage. We scrolled down to the first running shoe advertised and clicked on it, only to find that it was only a women’s shoe (which is not mentioned on the image on the homepage). We then had to click around to the men’s department, for this task’s purpose, in order to find a shoe and continue the process. Both sites get the job done, but Reebok was a more pleasant shopping experience.

With that said, here are the Usability scores:

(Reebok 9/10)        (Nike 8/10)

Verdict

Both sites performed respectably, but we can’t ignore that failure that Reebok experienced on the 13^th. Other than that, the sites performed quite similarly (and we actually preferred Reebok’s shopping experience a little more than Nike’s). Still, since we’re really weighing in here on web performance, the winner is rather clear —

How Much Impact Does an Hour of Website Downtime Have on a Business?

So, your business website is offline again and your IT team has sprung into action, trying to pinpoint the issue and fix it as soon as possible. Sure, it’s good that your IT experts are handling the problem responsibly, but do you know how much money your business may have lost during your website’s downtime? Well, if you are a major player in the ecommerce industry, chances are you could have lost millions of dollars by now. And that is not an overstatement.

Like it or not, even an hour of downtime can do a great deal of damage to your online business. Did you know that in 2014, Google experienced downtime which was caused by a virus and all Gmail, Google+ and Google Drive were affected by it? This downtime lasted for an hour, which decreased Google stocks by 2.4 percent.

But that’s not all! Amazon, the e-shopping giant, experienced 2 hours of downtime, presenting site visitors with cryptic HTTP messages. In just 2 hours, Amazon lost an estimated total of $3.48 million. That’s huge!

So, if you wish to estimate the true cost of an hour of website downtime has to your business, then you’ve come to the right place. Here are some of the more important variables you must consider when calculating this cost:

§  Impact on Business Sales

To figure out exactly how much an episode of website downtime costs in terms of sales lost, you’d need to determine what your average profits per minute are during the time period the downtime occurred. You can then multiply that average profit per minute times the number of downtime minutes to determine your total lost sales profits. If the downtime occurs at 2 in the afternoon, for example, it is most likely going to cost your business more sales than if the outage had happened at, say, 2 in the morning, when web traffic is typically much lighter.

§  Damage Done to Your Business Reputation

Downtime (especially if it’s frequent or at a crucial time) can scar your business’s reputation, losing the trust and loyalty of customers in your brand. Just like many businesses, you too have invested good money and a great deal of time in brand building. Your time and money can go to waste if you experience downtime—even if it is for just an hour. When considering the true cost of your site’s downtime, it is important that you keep in mind the resources you’ll need to spend to repair your tainted brand image going forward.

§  Money Wasted in Marketing Campaigns

Another factor to consider when determining the cost is the money you have invested in your marketing efforts, like PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. You need to figure out the amount of money that was spent on marketing while your site was experiencing downtime. This is important to calculate, because let’s face it – you literally didn’t reap any benefits from the invested money, because your site was inaccessible when prospects clicked on the PPC link or advertisement.

Prevention is Always Best!

Calculating the cost you might have incurred due to an hour of website downtime is essential, but there are precautions you can take to avoid unplanned downtime and keep your business up and running ’round the clock (and be a hero!). AlertBot is an intuitive web-based website monitoring service that can alert your team about website errors and slowness within seconds, and also help you keep track of your site performance. All of this is much needed to mitigate downtime issues significantly. Start the AlertBot 14-day free trial today!

Neeraj posted screenshots from his personal Android browser that indicated a new red “SLOW” icon branded next to links for YouTube and even a Google search result (scholar.google.co.in, to be exact). Today, we tried to replicate the same result on an iPhone, but were unable to bring up any “Slow” icons on our search results. (And comments on Neeraj’s report page seemed to reflect similar experiences.)

So what does this mean? It’s possible that Neeraj happened to stumble on a brief Google testing of an upcoming new search result feature, and if this is indeed on the horizon for the near future, website owners may want to do all they can to avoid that little dreaded scarlet branding.

Should this feature come to light soon, now would really be the ideal time to find a Website monitoring solution for your business’s website to ensure visitors and new clients aren’t deterred by Google’s little warning.

Click here for a list of solutions and more info on how AlertBot can help.