In this article, we will talk about how website downtime affects your websites Google SEO ranking.
There were the days when businesses operated within a few hours a day. Also, there were no chances of spreading your business all over the world. But now the world is changed so much. A business can open 24*7, and you have the power to spread it in every part of the world.
The power of the internet makes it possible for businesses to open 24 hours of every day of the week. Life becomes so easy and hassles free by the invention of the internet. But there are some drawbacks that make things hard for online business owners.
It is right that there is a lot of effort needed to serve 24*7 by your website. You have to do everything, be it maintenance and monitoring. You go for each and every possibility that can grow your online business or website.
But what happens at the time of website downtime? At the time of downtime, your user/customer will go to your competitors. These unwanted downtimes can really impact your Seo and sales.
In this article, we will talk about what is website downtime, How Website Downtime Affects SEO and Rankings, What are the reasons for Website Downtime, How to handle website downtime and more. Are you excited about it? If yes, then read this article till the end. You'll definitely find it helpful.
When a website is functionally unavailable for the users, the period of inactivity is called Website Downtime. It is also known as Outage Duration where a network is unavailable to use. Website downtime can badly impact your SEO, rankings, conversion and sales. The period of website downtime depends on the causes and types of the unavailability of the network. No matter what is the cause of the downtime, a website owner always gets the result of unproductivity and loss of sales. The downtime can be classified into two categories. The first is Unplanned downtime, and the second is planned downtime. Unplanned downtime can cause by system errors or network failures, and other issues that are beyond your control. On the other hand, planned website downtime is when you run scheduled maintenance on your website. It does not impact too much on your SEO and google rankings. Because it is preplanned, and you have control over the downtime.
Googlebot regularly crawls your website pages to index your website. When your website is down, the google crawler visits your website in a day to check whether it is up again or not. When your site is not up again, Google will drop your website in search rankings for a temporary period. If it is down for a longer period(several days), Google will drop your website from its index permanently. The worst thing about downtime is it makes your website unavailable for your users. Moreover, when the user hit the back button during downtime, the bounce rate of your website also increases. It also harms the SEO of your website. Hence, downtime can be a crucial thing for your website.
There are many reasons that can cause downtime. However, you can fix your website from downtime, you only have to solve the problem that causes unwanted down. But the best thing is you can prevent the website downtime from happening in the future. Most of the time, the main reason for downtime is your website hosting. It is mandatory to choose a hosting company that provides the best services, not poor quality hosting. And if you are having problems with your hosting company, you can switch to another hosting company that has a solid uptime record and specialization in WordPress, Joomla, etc. A good hosting company take care of your website, such as 99.99% uptime, performance monitoring and notify before any downtime. Other reasons for downtime are lack of maintenance, malicious hackers, DDoS attacks, database errors, etc.
You can deploy a backup server so that when your hosting provider announces maintenance, you will be able to stay online by launching a backup server. Other than that, you can use Web monitoring services to monitor your website and inform you before any downtime. Moreover, you can display an appropriate error message on your website when it gets down. So always make sure you have the 503 error pages ready. This helps you to tell the users and search engines that your website is temporarily down and will be back online shortly. You can also ask the user to try again after some time. This will also help you to prevent the error pages from being indexed instead of the content of your website.
The speed of your website does not cause downtime directly, but it will increase the bounce rate of the website. One thing to keep in mind is if your website is slowing down, it is an indirect indicator that your website can down soon. You should optimize your website regularly to prevent your website from going to crash.
You can optimize it by:
compressing the size of the images of the website
Caching methods
Avoiding flash
Minimizing JavaScript and CSS files
Optimizing database in CMS
Choosing the best-optimized web hosting
Website Downtime is one of the most important things that search engines consider when ranking a website. It does not affect when any short downtime happens. But if your website becomes down for a long time or happens many times, then it can be bad for SEO and rankings. Moreover, it can create a negative impression on your whole business. If your website experiencing downtime many times, then you should contact an expert. A website expert will help you so that Google doesn't penalize you. If you are looking for a Website Designer and Developer, you can contact us to get a fresh website or speed up your existing website. We are always here to help our clients.
