Load shedding changes how South African businesses operate, and it quietly changes what a website needs to do. When your phones are down, your card machine is offline and half your staff are working around a schedule, the website becomes the one part of your business that can carry on regardless.
Most sites are not set up to take advantage of that. A few small decisions change it.
Do not host it in your building
This sounds obvious and it still happens, usually as a leftover from an older setup or a server that runs something else useful. If your website is served from a machine in your office, it goes down when your power does, which is exactly when people are most likely to be checking whether you are open.
The same applies to on premises mail servers. Website and email should both live somewhere with proper power redundancy, and they should live in different places from each other so one failure does not become two.
Static is more resilient than dynamic
A site that generates every page from a database on each request has more moving parts than one serving prepared pages. More parts, more failure modes.
For a marketing site, generating the pages ahead of time and serving them through a CDN means your content stays available even if the origin server has a problem. It is faster, cheaper and considerably harder to break. The pages sit in edge locations and get served from there.
This is the architecture we default to for exactly this reason, and it matters more in a market where infrastructure is less predictable.
Say what your hours actually are
If load shedding affects when you can answer the phone or open the shop, put that on the site plainly. Not buried in a news post from last year.
Businesses that handle this well tend to do a few specific things.
- State the reality. If the workshop stops during stage four, say so. Customers are living through the same schedule and they respect the honesty.
- Offer an asynchronous route. WhatsApp or a form that reaches you when power returns beats a phone number nobody can answer. The enquiry survives the outage.
- Set expectations on response time. "We reply within two working hours" is a promise you can keep. Silence during an outage reads as a business that has closed.
Your customer's power is out too
The person visiting your site may be on mobile data because the fibre is down with the power, on a phone they are trying not to flatten, in the dark.
That argues for the same things good performance work always argues for, with more urgency. A light page that loads fast on a mobile connection. Text that renders before images. A tappable phone number without scrolling. Nothing that autoplays and drains a battery.
It also argues for making the important information reachable without a lot of navigation. Someone checking whether you are open should not need three taps and a page load to find out. See performance and Core Web Vitals for how we measure this.
Forms that survive a dropped connection
Connections here fail mid action more often than in markets with steadier infrastructure. A form that loses everything typed when the network drops is a genuinely costly piece of bad design, because the person rarely starts again.
Keep the values on failure, show a clear message, and let them retry. And make sure a failed submission actually says so, because a button that silently does nothing gets tapped repeatedly and then abandoned.
Know before your customers do
Uptime monitoring is inexpensive and most businesses do not have it. Something that checks your site every few minutes and messages you when it stops responding means you find out from a notification rather than from a customer, which is a materially better position.
Pair it with monitoring that your contact form still sends. Forms break silently more often than sites go down, and a broken form costs you enquiries you will never know existed. That is part of what a care plan covers.
The point of all this
When the power is off, your competitors' phones are also unanswered. A website that stays up, loads quickly on mobile data, says clearly what is happening and captures an enquiry for later is a real advantage during exactly the hours when everything else is difficult.
See how we work with South African businesses, or get in touch if you want your setup looked over.
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