The impact and cost of website downtime are high: loss of brand reliance, loss of sales and revenue, loss of customers, among others. However, one vital cost of downtime that can be easily overlooked is the impact it can have on your SEO rankings.
Why should downtime affect your SEO rankings, you ask? Google is all about providing the best for its users, and the user is its priority. If a visitor lands on your website to perform an activity, say, look for a piece of information or try to make a purchase, and your website is down and cannot provide the needed service, the user will leave your page. This will increase your bounce rate, which is not suitable for your website. More importantly, if this happens often, Google will see your page as one that is unable to meet users' needs and hence push it back, impacting your website's SEO ranking and visibility.
In this comprehensive blog post, here are what you will learn:
- What Google does to rank pages
- What happens to a page and its SEO rankings in website downtime
- What you should do to keep your rankings steady in downtimes
- Best Practices to avoid website downtimes
Understanding how Google ranks pages (Crawling and Indexing)
When you create a page on your website, for it to be visible to visitors, Google has to first find it and keep it in its "memory file." Google does this by deploying Google bots to search for new pages, and this process is known as crawling. When Google bots finally discover and crawl your website, they index your site and register it in the memory bank, making it visible and allowing it to show on the search result page.
From there, you start gaining organic traffic and appearing on the first page on Google as you apply search engine optimization best practices.
Understanding the impact of website downtime to a page and its SEO rankings
Here is what happens to your website pages in downtime systematically from the SEO ranking point of view:
1. 500 HTTP Status Code:
Google bots are consistently crawling pages on the web; if your page is down, the Googlebot will receive a 500 HTTP status code which is a status code telling the bot there is a problem with the site. Now, this won't have a negative impact on your search rankings yet. If your website is only down for a few hours, you can rest assured that your SEO rankings are still intact, provided it does not stay long, and the situation is rectified promptly.
2. Google bots Revisits:
After some time, Googlebots comes back to the page to check if it is still accessible. If it is still inaccessible after some time, that is when Google starts to penalize your page, and the downtime actually starts affecting your rankings. Your rankings begin to drop on the search results page and another website that is accessible below your page begins to rank higher.
3. Page gets de-indexed:
If the issue remains unfixed, your search engine rankings will continue to drop, with Google search engine bots relegating your page. If this continues for a prolonged period, Google will end up removing your page from its index, and your page will no longer appear on the search engine results page.When this happens, it affects your business in the following ways
a. Impact user experience negatively:
When your website pages are down, it affects your user experience negatively and hinders their activities on your website
b. Loss of hard-earned traffic:
When Google relegates your website pages to the background and you experience a drop in rankings, it costs you your hard-earned traffic. Website traffic is not earned on a platter of gold; it takes a lot of SEO effort to start ranking on the search engine results page (SERPs) and driving valuable traffic. Losing all that can be painful and devastating.
c. Loss of revenue:
You make money when potential customers come to your website and carry out transactions. If your website is down and your website traffic is affected, the number of people coming to your site is reduced, and the number of transactions going on on your website is reduced as well, leading to a loss of revenue.
How to keep your rankings steady in downtimes
When your website is offline and it is taking a while to get resolved, don't panic. The next thing to do is to set appropriate measures in place to keep your rankings steady.
Here is a list of actionable steps to implement:
1. Make use of 503 error pages:
503 error pages tells Google bots that your website is only unavailable temporarily and is not totally down. This allows Google bots to give you some grace and time for you to promptly rectify it without tampering with your rankings. There are different types of status codes and what they represent.
For instance, there are the 100s code, 200s code, and so on until the 500s status code. The vital status code in this situation is the 503 error code, which tells Google bots that your website is unavailable temporarily due to an error with your page and your page is under maintenance.
2. Promptly address the issue:
When you have a website downtime, and it is taking longer than necessary for the rectification, implement the 500 error code and promptly manage the incident so your website can be back up again. 500 error code shows there is an internal server error temporarily until you fix the problem, and activities can resume on your website generally like before.
3. Resubmit your Sitemap:
When you finally fix the situation, and your website is back up, one of the first things to do is to carry out an SEO audit and resubmit your sitemap to Google for re-indexing through your Google Search Console account.
4. Keep users updated through the use of status pages:
While you are fixing your website and trying to get it back up, it is essential to keep your website visitors in mind and keep them updated through the use of status pages. Website monitoring tools such as Pinghome offer status pages you can share to keep customers away from the situation and keep them tuned for when the website will be back up again. This way, your customers will know you have them in mind, helping you retain their trust and reliance for the period of downtime.
Preventing website downtime and its negative impact on SEO rankings subsequently
1. Utilize website monitoring tools:
Preventing a negative incident is better than trying to salvage it, and this situation is no exception. Rather than wait till you experience website downtime and it affects your ranking on search engines like Google, the best thing is to implement a website monitoring tool for your business that alerts you once your website is down.
That way, you are alerted promptly, and you can fix the issue before it gets prolonged and starts affecting your rankings. Website downtimes are unavoidable. They happen periodically for one reason or another, so whether you have experienced a prolonged one that negatively impacted your SEO rankings before or not, you should set up a reliable website monitoring tool that alerts you immediately of downtime and helps you manage the incident effectively.
Pinghome is a website monitoring tool that helps you monitor your website round the clock and makes sure you are the first to get alerts in downtimes. In addition, Pinghome enables you to manage the incident successfully, preventing prolonged downtime and affecting your online presence on the search engine results page.
2. Use Reliable Hosting Platform:
The platform on which you host your website is another crucial factor that determines the frequency of website uptime. If the platform is unable to handle your traffic or the number of transactions you carry out, you will experience downtimes more frequently. Using a reliable hosting platform such as Hostinger and subscribing to the appropriate plan reduces the occurrences you have and allows you to resolve downtimes faster.
3. Utilize content delivery network:
With a content delivery network, you have your delivery load distributed across different servers, and this helps you cache your content and reduces the amount of load on your website hosting, thereby reducing the frequency of downtimes you experience.
4. Regular website health checks and security implementation:
It is vital to have a particular time interval when you perform website health checks to ensure you are not overlooking any important detail that can lead to downtimes. You can have an SEO maintenance checklist you tick periodically through the use of your in-house SEO specialist, or you hire an SEO agency to get the job done.
In this health check period, also evaluate your security implementation and ensure you are on top of your game, as malicious attacks are one of the main reasons for prolonged time in these periods.
5. Compatibility checks before software installation:
Another cause of downtime is when you install software with your website whose code is not compatible with your website's code. Checking the compatibility before installing helps prevent such incidents.
Sign Up for Pinghome
If you are yet to implement a website monitoring tool for your website or you are on the lookout for a tool that is more efficient and meets your website monitoring needs better, then you should try out Pinghome.
With Pinghome, you enjoy prompt alerts in downtime, as well as the status page feature that allows you to share the status of your website with customers and retain them. You also enjoy effective incident management, among other features that actually matter to your business.
Get started with Pinghome by signing up for the no-cost trial today.