Best Practices When Site Is Undergoing Construction/Major Changes
SOLVE
Hi! We're in a situation where in two weeks we will need to temporaily pause operations and orders while we work to make improvements to the business. This means we are going to be making changes to our overall website and product offerings while we are in a pause.
We are planning on removing nav links from our homepage, only including the option for customers to log in and view their account or for users to visit a blog post to learn more.
Are there recommendations on how to proceed in terms of SEO? We have a lot of product pages and other miscellaneous pages currently indexed. I currently am thinking through this option:
We add a banner/pop up to our site across all pages that displays a message about the pause and a link to the blog post for more information. This way no matter what page you land on through Google, you will see this message, however will not be able to order anything.
However, should we consider any sort of page retirement or NoIndex strategy? It is not guaranteed that every product will be back, so not all our current pages will be relevant when we turn operations back on.
Any help is appreciated! And if you have other ideas or questions, I'd love to discuss.
Best Practices When Site Is Undergoing Construction/Major Changes
SOLVE
There's actually a few good articles that I'm going to share with you that will do a better job explaining the situation. In short, if your site has some accessible areas, you wouldn't want to 503 the entire site, but it may be worth editing for parts of your site like the shopping cart functionality.
Becuase this sounds like such a major change, I would consider not overwriting files on your site and setting up a new site in a new location and updating DNS to finish the changes because moving things into place could get messy depending on the complexity of the updates. It could be as simple as a new folder on the server, or as complex as a new server altogether.
Best Practices When Site Is Undergoing Construction/Major Changes
SOLVE
There's actually a few good articles that I'm going to share with you that will do a better job explaining the situation. In short, if your site has some accessible areas, you wouldn't want to 503 the entire site, but it may be worth editing for parts of your site like the shopping cart functionality.
Becuase this sounds like such a major change, I would consider not overwriting files on your site and setting up a new site in a new location and updating DNS to finish the changes because moving things into place could get messy depending on the complexity of the updates. It could be as simple as a new folder on the server, or as complex as a new server altogether.
Best Practices When Site Is Undergoing Construction/Major Changes
SOLVE
Every website has to perform maintenance at some point or another. Whether it’s just to upgrade a portion of the site or because of some problem with the site, it’s an inevitable fact of website ownership. And in many cases, maintenance requires taking your site offline for at least a few minutes. Ive been working on website and maintaining it. Most of site I work on are for e commerce just like shopify, shopify help and other ecommerce site. This tips might help you as well;
1. Keep Your Maintenance Pages Simple And Useful.
2. Realize It’s An Inconvenience To Your Visitors.
3. Don’t Be Afraid To Use Humor.
4. Give Your Maintenance Page The Same Look And Feel As Your Regular Site.
5. Let Visitors Know When Your Site Will Be Back.
6. Provide Recommended Content.
7. Invite Your Visitors To Come Back When The Site Is Online Again 8. Inform Your Visitors About The Progress Of The Maintenance