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Website maintenance is important because as good as you may have coded your website or however good the infrastructure they’re hosted on.
By carrying out maintenance at regular intervals over short periods of time you’d hope that this helps ensure that major, unexpected issues don’t rear their ugly heads. Maintenance on your terms and at a time of your choosing is absolutely preferable to your website doing down and you having to carry out unplanned maintenance.
Planned maintenance is time you set aside, and by its very definition, have planned in advance to makes changes to your website or server. During these short periods of maintenance you may need to make certain parts of your website inaccessible, but you should always try if you can avoid it.
In the case of planned website maintenance just try where possible, let people know in advance that it’s going to be happening; particularly if popular features or aspects of the website that people rely on are going to be inaccessible.
When informing customers of the planned maintenance give them a heads up of the extent of the disruption. Give yourself enough time to get your maintenance done before customers come flocking back expecting a full website service to have resumed.
As well as telling your “human” visitors you also need to make sure that the search engine crawlers know that your site being down is just temporary. You can do this by utilizing an HTTP status code “503 Service Unavailable.” This status informs the search engines that the downtime is only temporary and that they should come back later.
If you need help in setting up maintenance windows within your StatusCake account then please don’t hesitate to contact one of the StatusCake team by email or Live-Chat.
James Barnes
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