Your website is down: the customer-communication playbook
When your site goes down: the customer communication playbook — status updates, WhatsApp response templates and the post-incident review.
Downtime happens to every website eventually. The businesses that handle it well keep customers; the ones that go silent lose them. Here is the playbook.
Minute 0–5: know what you know
- Confirm it is real (your monitor alert + a fresh check in incognito)
- One question: you or the host? Check other Kairalmas-hosted sites / the support channel — an incident notice answers instantly
- Recent change? The last edit is suspect #1 (the backup ritual exists for this moment)
Minute 5–30: the messages
1. WhatsApp Business status: 'We're fixing a temporary issue with our website. Orders/messages work on WhatsApp as always — 0300XXXXXXX.'
2. Instagram story if your audience lives there (same text)
3. If an order surge was expected (campaign day): proactive message to today's enquirers
The template pattern: acknowledge + workaround + ETA promise you can keep. Never silence — silence reads as closed.
The recovery
- Fixed by you (rollback/update): verify every page, clear caches, THEN announce 'all sorted' with a thank-you for patience
- Fixed by host: confirm root cause in one support sentence you can quote to customers if they ask
The post-incident review (the part that prevents repeats)
Ten honest minutes: what broke, why, how long, what would have caught it earlier (monitor? backup? staging test?). One line in a log. The second occurrence of the same incident is a choice.
The long game
Customers forgive incidents; they remember the response. A fast, honest, workaround-offering response builds more trust than months of uninterrupted mediocrity. The playbook above is the whole difference — write your templates tonight, while nothing is on fire.