Why Site Reliability should be a priority

You might see terms like Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Automation as engineering jargon, but they are actually the most critical drivers of your success.

Why? Your customers have zero tolerance for a slow, buffering experience. The engineering processes that seem like "little things" are what ultimately separate a winning campaign from a failed one. This isn't about code; it’s about ROI protection and speed to market.

Why SRE should be a priority - the truth:

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that blends software engineering with operations to ensure that systems are reliable, scalable, and efficient. The goal of SRE is to guarantee the performance of your infrastructure while automating processes to reduce manual intervention.

1. Stability is the foundation of your User Experience (UX)

If your customers have a bad time, they won't be customers for long. This is the commercial reality of a hyper-competitive digital space.

Think of it like this: your site is your shop front. If the door won’t open properly, or the shelves are impossible to navigate, users won’t tolerate it. They will  go to the competitor who delivers a smooth, memorable experience. A poor UX due to bugs or slow speed will lead to a direct drop in sales and revenue. Stability is the experience.

This is exactly why SRE is critical. SRE ensures that your “digital storefront” stays open, fast, and easy to navigate. Through rigorous monitoring, automation, and proactive incident management, SRE keeps your platform reliable and performant, so your customers enjoy a smooth, seamless experience.

2. Slow pages kill revenue and SEO rankings

We know that Google cares deeply about page speed, and what matters to Google matters to your entire funnel.

• The conversion killer: For page speed alone, industry data shows that every second after 2.4 seconds loses about 7% of traffic, causing a measurable drain on your ROI.
• The SEO hit: Slow speeds hurt your SEO rankings, pushing your hard-won content further down the results page. Your users won't find you, and your investment in content goes to waste.

SRE prioritises eliminating these friction points, ensuring your platform is fast, clean, and supports your goals, rather than sabotaging them.

3. Automation solves your team and budget headaches

You want your engineering team focusing on revenue-generating features, not repetitive tasks. SRE and automation are the tools that make this possible.

• Counteract the talent crunch: Skilled engineers are difficult and expensive to hire. Automation helps your team circumvent this challenge by handling processes like deployment, testing, and database changes automatically. You get more output from your existing team.
• Onboarding and standards: By standardising processes, automation streamlines developer onboarding and ensures poor code never makes it to production. This dramatically reduces unexpected downtime and instability risk.

The core goal of SRE is to enable developers to move faster, ship more features, and not worry about repetitive tasks, keeping your customers and internal team happy.

How Firney uses SRE to keep your platform solid

At Firney, we use SRE principles to ensure your digital experience stays seamless, so you can focus on growing your business.

1. Set clear goals with Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
We start by defining clear, measurable targets for uptime and performance that align with your business needs. For example, aiming for 99.9% uptime or page load times under 2 seconds.

2. Real-time monitoring
We continuously monitor your system’s health—tracking key metrics like speed, errors, and traffic flow. We prioritise errors that impact your customers or business goals, so your team isn’t overwhelmed with noise.

3. Automation
Repetitive tasks like deployments, scaling, and incident responses are automated using advanced tools. This not only speeds things up but also reduces human error, keeping your platform running smoothly around the clock.

4. Fast incident response and learning from mistakes
When issues arise, we have clear processes in place for quick diagnosis and resolution, often supported by automation. We use the Five Why's technique to dig deep and identify the root cause of problems, ensuring they don’t happen again.

5. Planning ahead with capacity and load testing
We regularly test your system’s ability to handle expected traffic and sudden spikes. This proactive approach helps us identify bottlenecks before they affect your users and plan infrastructure upgrades ahead of time.

6. Always improving
SRE is a continuous journey. We use data and feedback to refine goals and update automation so your platform keeps getting better, faster, and more reliable over time.

How Firney can help

At Firney, we’re dedicated to building stable, high-performance infrastructure that keeps your site fast, reliable, and ahead of the curve. By automating repetitive tasks, we free your engineers to focus on the innovations that drive growth and give you a competitive edge. To see how Firney can help you build resilient, high-performing cloud infrastructure, read more about Firney’s cloud services here.