Website downtime and your Google ranking

Website downtime is annoying and can cost you not only customers, but also search engine rankings like Google. Of course, that's the last thing you want as a webmaster. In this article, we'll explain the effects downtime can have and how you can best protect your website from it. Let's get started!

Once your website's content is online and you're ranking in Google search results, you want to attract as many visitors as possible. A high position is never a guarantee and will always be the result of a lot of work and expense. Whether you do it yourself or hire a partner like MijnWebdesignPartner.nl to do it for you, you will always get a higher position in Google. Of the almost 200 factors Google uses to rank a website, it is of course important that your website is accessible without errors. If your domain name and website are inaccessible due to a technical error, your Google results will drop. Therefore, it is important that you ensure that your website has the highest uptime possible. You can achieve this by taking a number of precautions. We will discuss these in this article.

Downtime and its effects

It can happen to anyone that something goes wrong or something takes longer to complete during an update or publishing event. During this time, your website will be inaccessible. Of course, how long this lasts depends on you and how quickly you know how to fix the problem. Once your website is inaccessible for an hour, it will have little effect on your website's ranking. According to Google's John Mueller, the problem will soon reappear once your site is back online.

A question posed to him following a reddit post by a user whose website was down for 5 days was whether this had any impact. John Mueller responded that organic search traffic should return in a week or two. If this is not the case, it is not due to the downtime.

There are some important conclusions that can be drawn from John Mueller's detailed response to this question: If a site goes down with a 500 error. Google will immediately check the next day to see if the URLs and pages can be served again. However, if they are 4xx or 404 messages, then it is the case that they will no longer be indexed and abandoned. It is therefore important that you report the URLs again via Search Console after receiving these error messages. Lost rankings can then be restored within a few weeks. Assuming that the re-indexing of the pages goes well.

Preventing downtime

Complete uptime for your website cannot be guaranteed. There are always updates that need to be installed and many other reasons why a website may go down. When a website is down, it is important to determine what exactly is causing it and what the error message is. And how you can resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Another way to avoid downtime is to install timely updates for your website, such as WordPress websites, and take other steps. Such as creating backups or setting up scheduled tasks to do this automatically. And make sure your site is using the right underlying technology. Like the latest PHP version or ASP.NET version and of course the right hosting. At MijnHostingPartner.nl we are ready for you with an uptime of 99.99% and our super fast hosting packages with SSD storage will make sure your website is not only available, but also fast.

Article inspiration: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-website-downtime-shouldnt-impact-search-rankings/