John Mueller from Google shared insights in an article about how to temporarily shut down a website without affecting its search presence. Here are the key recommendations:
### Block Shopping Cart Functionality
If an e-commerce site needs to stop transactions temporarily, the advice is to disable the shopping cart feature. It’s essential to inform customers about the shutdown and to block the shopping cart page from being crawled using the robots.txt file or by applying a robots meta tag.
### Use an Interstitial or Pop-Up
For a complete site block, use an interstitial or pop-up to notify visitors of the temporary unavailability. Additionally, ensure the server returns a 503 HTTP result code (“Service Unavailable”) so that Google won’t index the temporary content. Using a 503 code is viable for up to a week, as longer periods may result in content being dropped from search results.
### Turn the Whole Website Off
Turning off the entire server is another safe method if you have a temporary server that returns a 503 HTTP result code for all URLs. It’s suggested to update your DNS to point to this temporary server during the downtime.
John Mueller outlines the steps for this approach:
1. Set your DNS TTL to a low time (such as 5 minutes) a few days in advance.
2. Change the DNS to the temporary server’s IP address.
3. Take your main server offline once all requests redirect to the temporary server.
4. …your server is now offline…
5. When ready, bring your main server back online.
6. Switch the DNS back to the main server’s IP address.
7. Change the DNS TTL back to its normal setting.
If you manage a local business that will also be closed during the website downtime, it’s advisable to update the opening hours in your local listings accordingly.
