Website downtime costs a small business four things: sales it couldn’t take, enquiries that went elsewhere, advertising that sent people to a broken page and the time spent getting back online. In our worked example below, six hours offline costs a trade business about $390. The real multiplier is how long it takes you to notice, which is why finding out fast matters more than any other number here.
Key takeaways
- Hours down = time to notice + time to fix. Most of the cost hides in the first part.
- Count lost sales, lost enquiries, wasted ad spend and recovery costs.
- Google Ads can disapprove ads whose landing page isn’t working, and Google Search slows crawling when a site returns server errors.
- Monitoring that alerts you within minutes is usually the cheapest way to cut the cost.
How do I calculate the cost of downtime?
Use the four parts below. You only need numbers you already know: monthly online sales, how many enquiries the website brings in, what a typical job is worth and your ad spend.
Not every lost visitor is a lost sale, because some come back later. Others don’t, and you never hear from them. Treat the result as a fair estimate, not an exact figure.
What does that look like for a real business?
Here are two worked examples with round, made-up numbers. Swap in your own.
A trade business that relies on enquiries
Say a plumber gets 60 website enquiries a month, mostly during about 220 working hours. They win one job in three, worth $450 on average, and spend $1,500 a month on Google Ads.
| Cost | Working | For a 6-hour outage |
|---|---|---|
| Lost enquiries | 60 ÷ 220 × 6 hours × 1 in 3 × $450 | About $245 |
| Wasted ad spend | $1,500 ÷ 220 × 6 hours | About $41 |
| Recovery | 2 hours of staff time at $50 | $100 |
| Total | About $386 |
Now imagine the site fails at 5pm Friday and nobody notices until Monday morning. The cost of the outage isn’t the six hours it takes to fix. It’s the whole weekend of missed enquiries before anyone knows.
An online shop
A shop selling $30,000 a month online averages about $41 an hour across the whole month ($30,000 ÷ 730). A 12-hour overnight outage costs roughly $493 in sales on that average, and more if it hits an evening sale or a promotion.
What costs don’t show up straight away?
- Paid ads. Google Ads can disapprove ads whose destination doesn’t work or returns an HTTP error to its crawler (Google Ads policy). Your ads can stay offline until the page is fixed and the ads are reviewed again.
- Search. Google says server errors make its crawlers temporarily slow down, and already indexed URLs are kept but eventually dropped if the errors persist (Google Search Central). A short outage is fine. Days of errors are not.
- Hacks. If the outage is a cyber attack, the costs climb fast. The ASD’s average cost per cybercrime report for small businesses was $56,600 in 2024–25 (ASD).
- Trust. A customer who finds your site down at the moment they’re ready to buy may simply call the next business on the list.
How do I cut the cost of downtime?
You can’t make a site that never goes down. You can make outages short.
- Get alerted fast. Uptime monitoring checks your site around the clock and tells you when it stops responding. Our guide to website uptime monitoring explains what a good monitor should check.
- Know who to call. Keep your host’s support number and hours somewhere you can find them at 7pm. Good Australian hosting support works the same hours as your customers.
- Have a recent backup. A clean copy stored off the server turns a disaster into a restore.
- Fix the cause, not just the symptom. If your website keeps going down, the pattern usually points to a cause you can fix for good.
How do we keep downtime short?
Every one of our website maintenance plans includes uptime monitoring, daily malware scans, off-site backups and a monthly report. Backups run daily on Essentials, four times a day on Advantage and hourly on Elite. Plans start at $40 a month + GST, plus a one-off setup, and our 24/7 emergency line, 0426 833 422, is there when something goes wrong after hours.
Run your own numbers through the calculator above, then compare the cost of one outage with a month of care.
Frequently asked questions
How much does website downtime cost a small business?
It depends on how much business your site brings in and how long it’s down. Add up lost sales, lost enquiries, wasted ad spend and recovery costs. In our worked example, six hours costs a trade business about $390, and a weekend nobody notices costs far more.
Does downtime hurt my Google rankings?
A short outage won’t. Google slows its crawling when it sees server errors and keeps pages it has already indexed. If the errors continue for a long time, those pages are eventually dropped from search, so long outages are the ones to worry about.
Will my Google Ads keep running if my site is down?
Possibly, until Google notices. Under its “destination not working” policy, Google can disapprove ads whose landing page returns errors. You pay for clicks to a broken page in the meantime, then lose the ads until the page is fixed and reviewed.
What is the quickest way to reduce downtime costs?
Find out sooner. Uptime monitoring alerts you quickly instead of waiting for a customer to tell you. After that, keep off-site backups and know exactly who to call, so the fix starts straight away.
Does a 99.9% uptime guarantee mean my site won’t go down?
No. 99.9% still allows about 8.8 hours of downtime a year. A guarantee usually means a service credit if the host misses it, not payment for your lost sales. Monitoring and fast support matter more than the percentage.
Sources
- Destination not working, Google Ads policies
- How HTTP status codes, and network and DNS errors affect Google Search, Google Search Central
- Annual Cyber Threat Report 2024–2025, Australian Signals Directorate, October 2025