The short answer: they are two different cases. For a short maintenance on a site that already exists, return the 503 status with a “come back shortly” notice: Google understands it is temporary and does not drop your pages. For a site that is not ready yet, do not leave it open to be indexed half built: either protect it with a password, or tell Google not to index it.
Maintenance: the 503 status
A maintenance page that answers with the normal status (200) tells Google “this is the content of the site”. If it stays that way for days, Google may replace your pages with the message. With the 503 (service unavailable) status and the Retry-After header you say the opposite: “I will be right back, change nothing”.
We measured that this works on our servers. Create a maintenance.html file with the message and add this to the site’s .htaccess (take a copy first):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance\.html$
RewriteRule ^ - [R=503,L]
ErrorDocument 503 /maintenance.html
Header always set Retry-After "3600"
The number is in seconds (3600 is one hour). The condition lets the message file itself open, otherwise the page loops. To end the maintenance, delete these lines.
A site not launched yet
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The safest way is a password: protect the site folder with Directory Privacy. Anyone without the password, Google included, sees nothing.
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On launch day, remove the “do not index” and confirm the robots.txt and sitemap are right. It is the most common slip: launched sites that keep asking Google not to look at them.
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| Situation |
What to do |
What to avoid |
| Maintenance of a few hours |
The 503 status with Retry-After. |
A “back soon” page with status 200. |
| A new site, still being built |
A password on the folder, or noindex. |
Leaving it open with the “coming soon” page indexed. |
| A change of domain or design |
301 redirects and the site ready before you switch. |
Putting the site under maintenance for days. See Redesigning a website without losing traffic. |
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On WordPress coming-soon and maintenance plugins do not always return the 503: some answer 200. Check with curl -I https://your-site (the first line shows the status) before leaving them on. And if WordPress got stuck in maintenance by itself, see WordPress stuck in maintenance mode.
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Need to put the site under maintenance and do not want to touch .htaccess alone? Open a ticket and tell us the domain and the hours.
Open a support ticket
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