Temporarily pause or disable a website
If you're unable to fulfill orders or many of your products out of stock, you may be considering
temporarily closing your online business. If the situation is temporary, meaning you expect to
be able to sell products in the coming weeks or months, we recommend that you take action that
preserves as much of your site's standing in Search as possible. This guide explains how you
can safely pause your online business.
Limit your site's functionality (recommended)
If your situation is temporary and you plan to reopen your online business, we recommend that
you keep your site online and limit the functionality. This is the recommended approach since
it minimizes any negative effects on your site's presence in Search. People can still find your
products, read reviews, or add wishlists so they can purchase at a later time. We recommend doing the
following:
- Disable the cart functionality
: Disabling the cart functionality is the
simplest approach, and doesn't change anything for your site's visibility in Search.
- Display a banner or popup
: A banner or popup div on all pages including the
landing page quickly makes the status clear to users. Mention any known and unusual delays,
shipping times, pick-up or delivery options, so that users continue with the right
expectations.
To prevent the content in the banner or popup from being shown in a snippet in Search results,
use the
data-nosnippet
HTML attribute
.
Make sure to follow our
guidelines
on popups and banners
.
- Update your structured data
: If your site uses structured data (for example,
Product
,
Book
,
Event
), make sure to adjust it appropriately
(reflecting the current product availability, or changing events to cancelled). If your business has a
physical storefront, update
Local Business
structured data
to reflect current opening hours.
- Check your Merchant Center feed
: If you use Merchant Center, follow the
best practices for the
availability attribute
.
- Tell Google about your updates
: To ask Google to recrawl a
limited number of pages (for example, the home page), use
Search Console
. For a larger number of pages (for example, all of your product
pages),
use sitemaps
.
Not recommended: Disable the whole website
You may decide to disable the whole website. This is an extreme measure that should only be
taken for a very short period of time (a few days at most), as it will otherwise have
significant effects
on the website in Search, even when implemented properly.
Make sure that you consider the following side effects of disabling your entire site:
- Your customers won't know what's happening with your
business if they can't find your business online at all.
- Your customers can't find or read first-hand information
about your business and its example, reviews, specs, repair guides, or manuals won't be
findable. Third-party information may not be as correct or comprehensive as what you can
provide. This often also affects future purchase decisions.
- Knowledge Panels may lose information, like contact
phone numbers and your site's logo.
- Search Console verification will fail, and you will lose
all access to information about your business in Search. Aggregate reports in Search Console
will lose data as pages are
dropped from the index.
- Ramping back up after a prolonged period of time will be
significantly harder if your website needs to be reindexed first. Additionally, it's
uncertain how long this would take, and whether the site would appear similarly in Search
afterwards.
If you decide that you need to do this (again,
not recommended
), here are
some options:
Best practices for disabling a site
While we don't recommend disabling your site, here are some best practices if you decide to do
this:
FAQs
What if I only close the site for a few weeks?
Completely closing a site even for just a few weeks can have negative consequences on
Google's indexing of your site. We recommend
limiting the site
functionality
instead. Keep in mind that users may also want to find information
about your products, your services, and your company, even if you're currently not
selling anything.
What if I want to exclude all non-essential products?
Can I ask Google to crawl less while my site is temporarily closed?
Yes, you can
reduce the Googlebot
crawl rate
, though it's not recommended for most cases. This may have some impact
on the freshness of your results in Search. For example, it may take longer for Search
to reflect that all of your products are currently not available. On the other hand,
if Googlebot's crawling causes critical server resource issues, this is a valid
approach. We recommend setting a reminder for yourself to reset the crawl rate once
you're ready to go back in business.
How do I get a page indexed or updated quickly?
To ask Google to recrawl a limited number of pages (for example, the home page), use
Search Console
.
For a larger number of pages (for example, all of your product pages),
use sitemaps
.
What if I block a specific region from accessing my site?
Google generally crawls from the US. If you block the US, Google Search won't be able
to access your site at all. We don't recommend that you block an entire region from
temporarily accessing your site; instead, we recommend
limiting
the site functionality
for that region.
No. If you do this, customers won't be able to find first-hand information about your
products on Search, and there might still be third-party information for the product
that may be incorrect or incomplete. It's better to still allow that page, and mark it
out of stock. That way people can still understand what's going on, even if they can't
purchase the item. If you remove the product from Search, people don't know why it's gone.