There are times when a business needs to temporarily freeze its e-commerce activity. Supply chain disruptions, seasonal closures, renovations, or events like the COVID-19 crisis can all force an online store offline for a period.
If you manage an e-commerce website and find yourself in this situation, there are several options to minimize the impact on your site’s ranking. In this post, I’ll explain your options and describe the advantages and disadvantages of each so that the effect on SEO will be minimal, if at all.
Freezing E-Commerce Activities without Harming SEO
If you need to freeze your online store’s activity, here are the main approaches to handle it:
1. Displaying a Temporary Closure Message (Not Recommended)
Similar to closing a physical store, you might consider displaying a message like “Temporarily Closed, We’ll Be Back Soon” on your website.
However, this option is not recommended for two main reasons. First, a website is not just a store. Even if visitors can’t make purchases, they should still be able to browse products, read reviews, save items to wishlists, and find information.
Second, Google’s crawlers won’t be able to scan the site properly, leading to a gradual disappearance from search results and a drop in organic traffic.
During any period of full site blocking, you may also lose important data in Google Search Console, since verification and data collection depend on the site being accessible.
2. Keeping the Site Functional with Disabled Purchasing (Recommended)
Google’s recommendation is to leave the site as is and inform users about the situation through a popup or banner. The site should remain browsable while the purchase option is disabled through one of the following methods:
- Marking all products as “out of stock.”
- Disabling the functionality of the shopping cart.
- Disallowing the addition of products to the shopping cart.
This way, there will be no change in the site’s indexing, its visibility on Google, and there will be no impact on rankings. The site will continue to function as usual and provide users with the same browsing experience, except for the purchase option.
This is the safest approach for SEO. Google has stated that businesses should limit, not disable, their sites during temporary closures. A fully accessible site with disabled checkout preserves your crawl budget, indexing, and rankings.
3. Removing Temporarily Unavailable Products (Not Recommended)
If you have difficulties supplying specific products, do not remove them from the site, and do not eliminate links to them from other pages. This guidance applies to any e-commerce site dealing with out-of-stock products.
Removing product pages will hurt the ranking of those pages when they return. The same applies to removing links from category pages or the main navigation menu – these links should stay in place.
Even if the product is currently out of stock, there’s no reason to lose the traffic it gets from search engines. When a product is temporarily unavailable, update its availability status and disable its purchasing functionality.
In such cases, it’s recommended to display links to alternative or similar products for visitors. More information on this topic can be found in the post handling products that are not available in the store from an SEO perspective.
4. Update Structured Data on the Site (Optional)
If you have integrated schema markup and structured data on your site – such as Product, Event, LocalBusiness, or other types – update the information accordingly.
For example, convert an in-person event to an online event using the eventAttendanceMode property, update a product’s availability to OutOfStock, or update business hours if applicable.
Google supports event structured data properties for cancelled, postponed, and virtual events. This structured data may appear in search results, so if brand credibility is important to you, make sure the correct information is displayed.
To update Google with these changes, request a recrawl of your site pages through Google Search Console. If dealing with a large number of pages, consider resubmitting your sitemap.
If You Need to Take the Site Offline
If there’s no choice and you need to take the site offline entirely, keep it as short as possible. Google tolerates brief outages of a few hours without significant SEO impact. However, if the downtime extends beyond one to two days, Google may begin deindexing your pages, and recovery can take months.
In this case, return a 503 status code in the HTTP response header. Unlike a 404 status code indicating “page not found,” a 503 tells search engines the issue is temporary and the site will return.
Include a Retry-After header to let crawlers know when to come back.
Returning a 503 status code in PHP:
<?php
header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable', true, 503);
header('Retry-After: 3600');And here’s how to do it using the .htaccess file on Apache servers:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^ - [R=503,L]
Header always set Retry-After "3600"Make sure your robots.txt file continues to return a 200 status code during maintenance. If robots.txt itself returns a 503 for an extended period, Google may stop crawling your entire site and eventually remove it from search results.
Additional Points to Consider
Here are some additional points that are good to know when handling temporary closures:
Preventing Specific Text from Appearing as a Snippet
To prevent specific text, such as a temporary banner message, from appearing as a snippet in search results, use the data-nosnippet attribute:
<p>This text might appear in a snippet <span data-nosnippet>and this part will not appear</span>.</p>What about Google Business Profile?
Google displays your business page in search results, so make sure to update it with relevant information. You can mark your business as “temporarily closed” directly in Google Business Profile.
A temporarily closed profile remains visible in Google Search and Maps while clearly indicating that you’re not currently operating. Once you reopen, update the status and business hours accordingly.
FAQs
Common questions about freezing e-commerce activity without hurting SEO:
Retry-After header and why should I use it?
Retry-After header tells search engine crawlers how many seconds to wait before checking the site again. For example, Retry-After: 3600 means "try again in one hour." Including this header with a 503 response helps Google schedule its next crawl attempt efficiently.robots.txt?
robots.txt during maintenance can cause pages to be deindexed. Instead, use a 503 status code with a Retry-After header. Keep your robots.txt file accessible and returning a 200 status code at all times.Summary
Whether you’re dealing with supply chain issues, seasonal closures, renovations, or any other situation that requires temporarily freezing your store, the key principle is the same: keep the site accessible and indexed.
The safest approach is to leave your site fully browsable while disabling the purchase option. If you absolutely must take the site offline, use a 503 status code with a Retry-After header and keep the downtime as short as possible. Once operations resume, update Google through Search Console and revert any temporary changes.
