If crawlers keep finding server errors (5xx) or time-outs, they slow down, and pages can drop out of the index after long outages.
Prevent problems
- Reliable hosting with enough resources for traffic peaks.
- Monitoring that alerts you when the site is down.
- Caching to cope with bursts of traffic.
During planned maintenance
Return 503 Service Unavailable with a Retry-After header, not a 200 page that says "under maintenance". 503 tells crawlers to come back later without dropping pages.
Short outages
A few minutes of downtime rarely affects rankings. Search engines retry. Long or frequent outages are the problem: pages may drop from the index, and visitors lose trust.
Error spikes after changes
Deployments, plugin updates and server changes often cause errors on some pages, not the whole site. A site audit after each change shows any page that returns 5xx.
Hosting checklist
- Enough memory and CPU for your traffic peaks.
- Automatic backups you have tested restoring.
- Up-to-date server software.
- A status or monitoring service that alerts you by email or SMS.
Communicate
If your site is down for planned work, tell customers in advance and keep it short. A 503 response with a friendly message is better than a broken page.
Check
- A site audit lists every page that returned a 5xx error or could not be fetched.
- The ping test and website hosting checker help when a server seems slow or unreachable.
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