Letting Your Website Expire or be Unavailable

A note of caution to website owners about not having your website up and running.

Almost all website hosts will turn off a website that is unpaid. In the case of pageBuzz.com any website that is overdue will automatically become unavailable and users cannot access pages. This can be devastating for your business as well as your website and reputation.

While there may not be a significant financial impact or fees to reactivate the site, there is an immediate impact on the ability for people to find your website online.

In most cases, there will be a placeholder page with an overdue message or website temporarily unavailable message that everyone can read. Since you are not normally accessing your website daily, your customers will be the ones to read it which gives them little or no confidence in your business and the way you run it.

How can anyone trust you to ship products or provide services when you can't even keep your own website open?

The worst part is that many of the business owners don't even realize the website is down. We get calls constantly asking why the website is down. When we tell them it is unpaid they don't understand. When we explain that they were sent several emails explaining the situation they often know they got messages but never read them assuming everything was fine.

It is hard to tell your customers that you just were too lazy to read the messages so they often blame the host or the bank or anyone expect themselves.

So lets chat about what the impact is on the website in the search engines.

If the search engines come to your website while it is down pages cannot be accessed and instead they get a message that the business is closed or unavailable. Since the search engine does not have access to your financial records it will now index the new page as your page. Any inside pages will be eliminated from the search because they cannot be reached and assumed that they have been removed.

In just a couple of days you can wipe out what took years to build up in the search engines and created a mark against yourself in the searches because the website is now only one page of unrelated content.

This would be like having a retail store and closing for 2 days at the end of each month and posting banner across the front windows proclaiming that you are "OUT OF BUSINESS". Regardless of your reopening 3 days later, the damage is done. People saw the sign and assume the business is closed and never come back.

This is what the search engines do to your website making it hard if not impossible for anyone to find it again.

But lets say you are still indexed.Now the information they have is that the site is closed.

We have had frantic calls from customers that tell us their website is closed. When we look at it all is fine and we assure them it is working as it should be.

NO, NO, NO! they exclaim, when you search the intent the description says the business is closed!

That would be correct, because that is what the search engine found on the page the last time it was there. Now you are stuck waiting until the next index update which could be months before the information is back to your actual page details.

Unlike having your power or water turned off and back on, having a website go down is about as bad as it gets. Users and bots both instantly get the impression that you are closed or out of business completely.

It puts you back at a starting point in the searches and can impact customer confidence. The search engines will not place you because the site is not dependable and not worth sending people to when it may not be open.

I am always amazed at how hard people work and how much money they spend seeking top placement in the searches. But they often ignore what is most important, the actual website.

They short the content on the pages, ignore the need for content and text rich pages and useful information and worst of all they let the site expire each month before they pay the bill.

As the hosting company, of course we want to get paid. But as the website owner you have the responsibility of keeping the doors open. Just as you would with a real store opening on a set schedule each day. Failure to do so each month can make your website/business useless and over time destroy your entire business.

I can tell you that if we were down even for a few minutes my phone would be ringing off the hook with complaints. But I commonly see owners pay for websites days and even weeks after they are due.

They are clueless as to how much damage they are doing to their own reputation despite chewing my head off for being down even a single minute and swearing they will sue us for damages to their business and reputation. So which is it? Are you being damaged being down? Or is it not important enough to keep the site open?

There is nothing that is more devastating to your website than not being available for days at a time. If you are not going to take it seriously, then don't bother at all. Not having a website is better than having a website that says you are closed.