Website failures leading to billions in lost revenue

Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application modernisation, software testing and requirements management solutions, has revealed new research showing the risks businesses face from failing websites.

UK businesses risk losing up to £36.7 billion in revenue a year, according to the company, should their websites fail during peak periods. The assertion stems from a joint report held with the Centre for Economic and Business Research which found that nearly £100 million of British e-commerce is already lost due to website failures and outages every year.

The UK's e-commerce industry is worth £320 billion per year and is also growing at 20 percent year-on-year, predicted to grow faster still in the next ten years as smartphones fuel online transactions.

David Valentine, general manager at Micro Focus, comments: “As a result of website failures, almost £100 million of e-commerce revenue is already lost every year. If businesses don’t ensure their e-commerce applications can handle the extra loads experienced during peak times, such as July and the run-up to Christmas, the cost could reach £36.7billion.

“Making sure that websites and the applications that run on them are tested for the highest volume of anticipated users has traditionally been expensive and difficult to manage but new, scalable cloud-based testing services make this much more cost-effective.”

Micro Focus states that web traffic can vary from 5,000 transactions at normal times to 50,000 during peak or promotional periods.