Today, we're going to be sharing best practices for planned website outages, using a temporary 503 status and a simple page hold. There can be many reasons for planned website outages,
including scheduled maintenance, maybe launching a new site or changing DNS servers to name a few.

Before taking you're site down - one of the key things to consider, if you're not already, is how will this downtime purpose my organic search site rankings? It's a valid concern. If the search engine spiders crawl your site and find that it's already swapped for a humble farm page, there's a good chance it will be cached and affect your rankings.

The great news - is that there is a simple solution to overcome this problem. What you can do is recommend your temporary occupancy normally, but declare '503 - temporarily unavailable' status and then redirect your website to that page. Google spiders recognize and honor their 503 status and will simply come back later without crawling or caching your site.

In the training video above, we can show you a real-life scenario and example of this practice.

PHP Header Code for your 503 Page

The code below is very important for declaring your temporary '503' status. Once you have created your "offline.php" page, add the following code to the top. This should even appear before the DOCTYPE tag opens according to our HTML5 example below.

.HTACCESS Code for Redirecting to your 503 Page

Your hosting provision supports ". Htaccess" then you can rewrite the entire traffic (including Search Bots) to your "offline", 503 pages. If you don't name your new page as "offline'php" then just update the reference against the third and fourth lines of code.