Status Page Best Practices That Reduce Support Tickets

The status page is a support tool

When something breaks, your customers do one of two things. They contact support, or they check your status page. Every person who finds a clear answer on the status page is one fewer ticket in your queue at the worst possible moment. Related: How to Write a Clear Incident Update Your Customers Trust

That means the status page is not a formality. It is a lever you can pull to keep support manageable during an incident. Related: What is the best way to schedule a maintenance window without alarming your customers?

Keep reading: How to Choose an Uptime Check Interval That Actually Catches Outages, Uptime vs Response Time: What to Monitor and Why Both Matter, How to Set Up Alerting That Avoids False Alarms. See how PingCrumb helps you uptime monitoring and hosted status pages.

Put it where people look

Host the status page on a subdomain your customers can guess, such as status.yourbrand.com, and link to it from your app and your help center. A status page nobody can find does not reduce a single ticket. Related: Why does a website return 200 OK while customers see a broken page?

Write updates for a worried human

During an incident, post a short, plain update quickly, even if all you can say is that you are investigating. Say what is affected, what is not, and when the next update will come. A promise of an update in thirty minutes stops people from refreshing and emailing. Related: How do you run an on-call rotation when your whole team is three people?

Avoid jargon and blame. A calm, specific message earns more trust than a perfect one that arrives an hour late.

Show history and recovery

Keep a visible history of past incidents and their resolutions. It proves you handle problems well, and it reassures a prospect evaluating your reliability. When the incident is resolved, mark it clearly and post a short summary of what happened.