Spring is coming — and so are the thunderstorms, tornadoes, and flooding events that can knock out power across your entire service territory in a matter of minutes. Is your utility’s website ready before the first major storm hits?
Waiting until a storm is in the forecast to think about your website is too late. The utilities that handle severe weather season best are the ones that do their preparation in the quieter weeks beforehand. Here’s a practical checklist for getting your website storm-ready this spring.
Audit Your Outage Map Now, Not During the Storm
Pull up your outage map today and pretend you’re a worried customer at midnight with the lights out. Does it load fast? Is it readable on a phone? Does it show estimated restoration times? If you’re squinting or waiting, your customers will be frustrated in a crisis. Fix the slow load times, broken links, and confusing labels before storm season arrives — not after.
Pre-Build Your Storm Center Page
Don’t create your storm communications hub from scratch when a tornado watch is already posted. Build the page now — a dedicated storm center with placeholder sections for active alerts, restoration updates, crew status, and safety tips. When severe weather strikes, you’re flipping a switch, not scrambling to build a page. This also gives you a URL to promote in advance through bill inserts and social media.
Test Your Mobile Experience on Real Devices
Spring storms mean people are checking your website from phones in their basements, in their cars, and on spotty cellular connections. Grab a few different smartphones and actually walk through the outage reporting process, the storm center page, and the contact options. You’ll likely find things that look fine on a desktop but are broken or frustrating on mobile. Fix those now.
Load Test Before the Season Starts
A widespread outage event can send thousands of customers to your website simultaneously. If you haven’t stress-tested your site under load recently, spring is the time to do it. Work with your IT team or hosting provider to simulate traffic spikes. Identify where the bottlenecks are. Pre-arrange the ability to scale up server capacity quickly when a major storm is in the forecast — being reactive here is far cheaper than a site crash during an actual event.
Update Your Safety and Resource Content
Spring storms bring specific hazards: downed lines from high winds, flooded substations, and generator safety risks. Review your website’s safety resource pages and make sure the content is current, specific, and easy to find. A buried PDF from
three years ago doesn’t cut it. Short, scannable pages with clear headers and bullet points are far more useful to a stressed customer than a dense document.
Set Up or Refresh Text and Email Alert Signups
During extended outages, customers don’t want to keep refreshing your website — they want you to reach them. Make sure your text and email alert signup is prominent, easy to use, and actually working. Test it yourself. Send a test notification. If the process takes more than 60 seconds from start to finish, simplify it. Customers who sign up before a storm are far less likely to flood your call center during one.
Coordinate With Your Communications Team
Your website doesn’t operate in isolation during a storm event. Whoever handles your social media, press releases, and customer emails needs to know exactly how the website fits into the communications plan. Who posts storm center updates? How often? What’s the process for getting accurate crew counts and ETR information from operations to the web team? Walk through a simulated event scenario before the season starts. These conversations are much easier to have now than at 2 a.m. during a major outage.
The goal of all this prep work isn’t perfection — it’s resilience. Your website will face unexpected challenges during a real severe weather event. But a utility that has done the work ahead of time will handle those surprises far better than one that hasn’t. Use the calm before the storm to your advantage. Your customers will notice the difference.
Article provided by Donald Moore, President Moore Tech Solutions, Inc. Moore Tech Solutions provides website services for CSA and several member utilities.
