Website downtime

A down site costs more than the missed checkout.

Cost of website downtime starts with abandoned carts, but search visibility, customer trust, and support load carry the cost past the outage window. Enter traffic-equivalent server count, revenue impact, MTTR, incident frequency, and SLA target.

cost of website downtime ecommerce downtime cost website outage cost calculator cart abandonment cost site outage SEO impact

Calculate website downtime cost Beyond checkout

Scroll for hidden costs

InputsEcommerce model

Storefront capacity servers or checkout nodes

Revenue per node hour average order value flow, USD

MTTR hours per incident

Incident frequency events per year

SLA target availability percent

Estimate SLA breach risk

Annual downtime cost

Hidden outage tax: $0

Direct loss $0

Hidden tax $0

0h Annual outage time

0h SLA budget

0h Budget overrun

Beyond checkout

The visible loss is the smallest number.

Abandoned carts during the outage are easy to see in analytics. The costs that outlast the incident — search visibility, customer trust, and support volume — are harder to see and often larger.

Search visibility risk

Extended or repeated outages can affect crawl behavior and, in severe cases, search rankings — a cost that compounds long after the site is back up.

Trust and reviews

Customers who hit a down site during a purchase are less likely to return, and more likely to leave a negative review referencing reliability, not just price.

Support volume spike

"Is your site down?" tickets and social mentions spike during and after an outage, adding staffing cost the checkout-loss figure alone does not capture.

FAQ

Cost of website downtime, answered.

Questions ecommerce and marketing teams ask before building a website uptime business case.

How do I calculate the cost of website downtime? Estimate the revenue your storefront generates per hour and multiply by expected annual outage hours (MTTR times incident frequency), then add a hidden-cost allowance for support surge and customer trust impact.

Does a short outage really hurt SEO? A brief outage is unlikely to have a lasting effect. Repeated or extended outages can affect crawl efficiency and, in severe or recurring cases, rankings — reliability is a long-run SEO input, not just a UX one.

What is a typical cost of downtime for an online store? It scales directly with revenue per hour: a store doing $10,000 per hour in sales loses roughly that much in direct revenue for every hour fully down, before hidden costs.

How does this relate to internal IT downtime cost? They are complementary. See cost of IT downtime for the internal, productivity-first view, or the full annual model for the general case.

Your annual outage exposure is $0.

Adjust the calculator to produce a shareable website downtime cost estimate for an uptime investment case.

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