Hurricane season: keeping your website and business online

Your website is infrastructure, not marketing

During and after a major storm, local power and telecoms fail before the internet as a whole does. Customers, suppliers, insurers and worried families overseas all converge on the same place: your website and your social profiles. If the site is hosted on-island, or depends on someone in the office to update it, it goes quiet at the exact moment it matters most.

Guests with bookings need to know whether to travel. Clients need to know whether deadlines hold. Staff need to know where to report. All three are answerable from one page if it was prepared in advance.

The pre-season checklist

Work through this in May, before the season starts, and again after any significant site change.

• Host off-island on a distributed or edge platform so local infrastructure damage does not take the site down.
• Keep automated backups off-island, and restore one to a test address to prove it works.
• Confirm domain and DNS control: know the registrar login, keep contact details current, and enable auto-renew so nothing lapses mid-season.
• Prepare a status banner component that can be switched on in minutes with pre-written wording for watch, warning, closure and reopening.
• Document who is authorised to publish updates, with at least two people in different locations who have tested access.
• Check that phone numbers, email addresses and an alternative overseas contact are correct on every page.
• Enable a simple offline or low-bandwidth fallback so the key page loads on a weak connection.
• Export critical data — bookings, client contacts, invoices — to a copy held outside the territory.

Communicating during an event

Short, dated, factual updates outperform reassurance. Say what is known, what is not known and when the next update will come. Publish to the website first and syndicate to social channels, so there is a single authoritative source rather than conflicting comment threads.

Keep the update at the top of the homepage rather than on a separate news page nobody will find, and keep the rest of the site intact so the enquiry route still works for customers thinking about next season.

Afterwards

Recovery communication is a commercial opportunity as well as an obligation. Publishing a clear reopening date, current conditions and honest photographs restores confidence far faster than silence, and the pages tend to attract strong search and AI-answer visibility because they answer exactly what people are asking.

Then run a short review: what failed, who could not access what, which contact list was out of date. Fix those items while the experience is fresh, and fold the checklist into your annual website management cycle.