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:

• If you need to urgently disable the site for 1-2 days, then return an informational
  error page with a 503
  HTTP response status code instead of all content. Make sure to follow the
  best practices for disabling a site.
• If you need to disable the site for a longer time, then provide an indexable home page as
  a placeholder for users to find in Search by using the 200 HTTP status code.
• If you quickly need to hide your site in Search while you consider the options, you can
  temporarily remove a website from Search.

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:

• Continue to allow crawling through the robots.txt file. Don’t return a 503 HTTP
  response status code for the robots.txt file because this blocks all crawling.
• Confirm a 503 HTTP response status code locally by using
  curl or a similar tool. For example:
• To minimize the server-side and client-side load of a 503 error page, follow these best practices:
  • Use the retry-after
    HTTP header with a best effort date or duration.
  • Use static HTML.
  • Minimize off-page resources; use inline CSS stylesheets and base-64-encoded images.
• Give your users clear guidance on future steps within the content of the error page. This
  could include:
  • Links to more information
  • The date when you expect the website to be online again, or when the information will be
    updated
  • How to contact customer service
• Don’t disallow all crawling in the robots.txt file. Returning a valid robots.txt file that
  disallows all crawling may remove the website’s content, and potentially its URLs, from Google
  Search.
• Don’t block the website by returning 403, 404, 410 HTTP status codes, or with a
  noindex robots meta tag or x-robots-tag HTTP header. This will remove the
  website’s URLs from Google Search.
• Don’t use the temporary website removal tool in Search Console for closures. Doing so will
  make it impossible for users to find your website so that they can learn its status. Also,
  potential resellers or affiliates of your business’s products may continue to be shown in
  Search.
• Don’t block your robots.txt file with a 503 HTTP response status code.