Sometimes there is a time interval where you need to bring some major changes in your website. At such time, you have to make the website inaccessible to the users temporarily. Below are the suggestions for manage downtime during website maintenance.
Inform them that it is TEMPORARY
Inform the human visitor and the search engines that you are shut down temporarily and you will be back soon. In this way, they will return back after a certain period of time to check.
Never give the output “404 Error – The website was not found”. People and search engines are unaware about what is happening. They have no idea if the website is permanently shut down or temporarily shut down.
Some also upload a simple page with text meaning that the site is unavailable due to some reasons. But this is interpreted only by humans. The search engines won’t be able to indentify this as it makes no sense for them.
Use HTTP Status Codes
The server hosting the website that we access sends a message to our browser regarding the HTTP Status Codes. For SEO, it’s important to know these HTTP Status Codes. Some of them are 200 OK which means which is a standard HTTP status received denoting that the request has succeeded.
