Did you know? · No. 05 · Tip ·
A 503 tells Google your maintenance outage is temporary
Planned maintenance still needs the right HTTP response. Google recommends an informational error page that returns HTTP 503 Service Unavailable when a whole site must be unavailable for 1–2 days. Add a Retry-After header with a best-effort date or duration, and keep robots.txt reachable with a valid response.
A 200 tells Google to consider the page’s content for indexing; a maintenance screen can be treated as an error page, including a soft 404. A 404, 410, or noindex can remove URLs from Google Search. Google slows crawling after 5xx errors and preserves indexed URLs at first, but persistently failing URLs are removed. For a closure lasting longer than a couple of days, Google advises leaving an indexable 200 home page rather than returning 503 site-wide.
Try this on your site
Before your next maintenance window, configure the maintenance route to return 503 with a Retry-After value, then test it with curl -I. Restore normal 200 responses as soon as work is done; if the shutdown will last longer than two days, keep a useful indexable homepage live.
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Each fact is checked against the primary sources listed. Spotted an error? Email the Status Is UP team. Status Is UP helps owners improve their sites; it is not an uptime monitor. For live outage status, see Status Is Down.