Leave every page in place and add a closure banner with the dates and the reopening day. Update the hours on the site and the Google listing, and if the site must go offline, return a 503 status.

One notice where the site used to be

A family restaurant closes for two weeks every summer. Before leaving, the owner has the website replaced with a single page: closed for our summer holiday, see you soon.

The menu, the hours, the directions and the private dining page all vanish. Anyone who follows an old link lands on the notice, and so does Googlebot.

Two weeks later the full site goes back up, and for a while some of its pages are missing from search results, or show the holiday notice as their description.

What Googlebot finds while you are away

Googlebot does not know the restaurant is on holiday. It keeps visiting the pages it knows and records what it finds there each time.

If every address now shows the same short notice, the menu page looks like a page whose content has gone. Google may start treating such pages as removed and drop them from its index.

Dropped pages return once Googlebot finds them again, but that takes time, and the first weeks after reopening are exactly when the restaurant wants to be found.

Five ways to close a site, and what each says

How the site is closed decides what Google concludes. The common choices send very different messages:

Only the last leaves the pages as Google knows them. Each of the others asks Google to reconsider the site at the moment you least want it to.

A banner on every page

Keep the site as it is and add a short banner at the top of every page, in text rather than an image, with the dates and the reopening day.

A banner reading "Closed July 28 to August 10, open again Monday, August 11, at 11:30" tells visitors everything they need, and still reads sensibly if Google shows it as a description for a while.

Add what still works during the closure, such as gift cards, catering enquiries or bookings for later dates, and who answers email in the meantime.

Hours on the site and on the listing

Change the hours page to show the closure, and say the same in the phone greeting and on Facebook, so every place a customer checks agrees.

On the Google My Business listing, change the hours for the two weeks and set a reminder to change them back. Do not mark the business closed, which on a listing means closed for good.

Directories and review sites that show your hours, Yelp among them, deserve the same change wherever you can edit them.

When the site has to go offline

Sometimes the site must be switched off, for a server move or work that cannot be done on a copy. Then the server should answer every request with a 503 status.

A 503 says the service is unavailable for now. Googlebot treats it as temporary, leaves the pages in its index and comes back later, especially when the server says when to retry.

It is meant for hours or a few days, not two weeks. A 503 that runs on and on can start to look permanent, so keep the offline part as short as the work allows.

A worked example

A cocktail bar in a downtown heritage building closes for two weeks each August for maintenance and staff holidays. Its site has a drinks menu, hours, private events and a reservations page.

Last summer the whole site was replaced with one page and a photo of the shuttered door. After reopening, searches for the bar showed the closed notice, and the private events page went missing for weeks.

This summer the pages stay as they are. A text banner on every page gives the closing dates and the reopening night, and the hours page and the listing's hours match it.

The reservations page still takes bookings from the reopening night onward, and the private events form stays open, with a line saying replies will come after the break.

Googlebot keeps finding every page it knew, with the same content and one new line at the top. Nothing in that looks like a site that has closed.

The people still searching

During a closure people still look the business up: visitors planning a trip, someone booking a birthday for next month, an office planning its December party.

A site that is still there answers them. A single notice turns them away, and some will not think to come back.

Reopening day

Remove the banner the morning the doors open, restore the hours on the site and the listing, and change the phone greeting back.

Then check Webmaster Tools for crawl errors over the closure. Fetch as Google will show whether a page returns normally, which confirms that nothing was left switched off.

Look at the search results for the business name too. If the banner still shows as the description, it will change as Googlebot revisits the pages.

The counter-case

A closure of a day or two needs only updated hours and a line on the home page.

A business closing for good is different again, and should say so plainly rather than leave a holiday notice up indefinitely.

And some sites truly do need to be offline for a stretch. For them a 503 for the hours of the work is the honest signal; for a holiday, the site should simply stay up.

Closing the doors but not the site

  1. Leave every page exactly where it is.
  2. Add a text banner with the dates and reopening day.
  3. Update the hours on the site and the listing.
  4. Keep bookings open for dates after reopening.
  5. Use a 503 only for work that needs the site offline.
  6. Set a reminder to undo it all on reopening day.
  7. Check for crawl errors once the doors open.

Step one is the whole idea. Everything else adds information for visitors, but leaving the pages alone is what keeps Google seeing the restaurant as it did before the holiday.

Fetch as Google, used on reopening day, can also draw each page as Googlebot sees it, for comparison with what visitors see, as seeing a page the way Google renders it explains.

Frequently asked questions

Should I take the website down while we are closed?

No. Leave every page in place and add a text banner with the closing dates and the reopening day. Taking pages away invites Google to drop them.

What does Google do if every page shows a closed notice?

It sees pages whose content has gone and may treat them as removed, dropping them from its index until it finds the full pages again after reopening.

What is a 503 status?

A server response meaning the service is temporarily unavailable. Googlebot treats it as temporary and returns later, but it suits hours or days, not weeks.

Should I mark the business closed on Google?

No. On a listing that means closed for good. Change the hours for the closure instead, and set a reminder to change them back on reopening day.

What should the closure banner say?

The dates, the reopening day and time, and anything still possible meanwhile, such as gift cards or bookings for later dates. Use text, not an image.

What should I check after reopening?

Remove the banner, restore the hours everywhere, and look in Webmaster Tools for crawl errors over the closure. Fetch as Google confirms pages return normally.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

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