: How to close a website for a few months without affecting SEO? I have a website with around 5,000 organic traffic per month. My hosting company asked me to move to VPS because my site is

@Barnes591

Firstly, resources are very cheap these days so, I guess you can find way around.

It is not recommended to make your website offline for that long as it will impact on ranking, you may be able to recover but the impact will be there.

Affiliate:
If you got high traffic, depending on the industry you may be able to find some affiliate to finance your hosting.

Additional Note:
There are so many cheap hosting companies and some may run bit slow and might not be that reliable but you may consider as an option instead of making it offline.

Recently Webmasters blog made some announcement about making website offline temporarily: webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/02/closing-down-for-day.html

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@Kevin317

Unfortunately, you can't take down your website, or hide it from search engines, and not take a hit in the SERPs. If the search engines have you in the index, they'll come to your site to crawl it again, and once they don't find anything there, or are turned away, those rankings will likely plummet. Here's what you can do:


Put your website in Maintenance Mode. That means displaying a Maintenance Mode message/splash page. Make sure that your header response is 503 - Service Unavailable. It tells the spiders that this is a temporary condition. Be sure to also include a Retry-After directive, which will tell the spiders to come back after a certain date. (If you go this route, it's still best to take down Maintenance Mode as soon as possible; leave it on for too long, and the search engines will treat your 503 as a 404.)
Put up a Coming Soon page. Same concept as Maintenance Mode, but the server response should be 200. Yes, you'll lose rankings, but at least you'll keep your site indexed. This is the worse of the two solutions, but better than nothing. (If you're running on WordPress, the WP Maintenance Mode plugin provides both modes.)
Work with your web host to see how you can make your site compliant. You may have to temporarily remove some of your resources, like downloads and videos.
Find a web hosting company that can accommodate your website at your price point.

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