How to Deal With Planned Hosting Downtime

Hosting providers often have to plan downtime to update something.

You might also need to plan downtime to work on your own site.

Google recently released its suggestions on how to deal with planned downtime. Let’s explore them.

What Not to Do

Here’s how not to handle downtime.

• Take your site offline and serve a 404 Not Found error.
• Put up a status page and serve a 200 error.

Both can cause problems with Google, and visitors hate these solutions too.

How to Please Google

Google recommends your server return a 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable). Google will ignore it, and that’s what you want.

The code can also be customised to include meta information about when the site will be back, giving Google an idea when to re-crawl the site.

This solution isn’t great for long periods of downtime, as it could get you de-indexed. But for normal maintenance, it’s perfect.

How to Set Up a 503

Using WordPress? There’s an easy plugin that returns a 503 error to everyone but the logged in user.

Drupal users can easily put their site into a 503 maintenance mode by following two steps.

If you’re not using WordPress or Drupal, you can create a 503 using .htaccess and a maintenance.php file.