What to do when my website is down?

10 years ago

First make sure that your site is actually down and that it isn’t your internet connection. Visit other websites to see if they are reachable. Also try visiting your website on other devices or have a friend visit it from their computer. If it is down, one thing you should always do is notify your users that your site is down. You can do it through social media or you can set up a backup webpage that will show a “We’re working on it!” page.

Temporarily direct your domain to that webpage until your actual website is back online. Let them know what is going on and when to expect your website to go back online. It is good courtesy to keep your users in the loop so that they know you care.

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Why you should backup your website and database

10 years ago

If your website involves a database where you store user information, you should backup your website files and database frequently in case your web server has hardware failures that is non-fixable. Depending on how often your website updates and stores new information, you can create automatic backups from monthly, weekly, daily or by the minute. It is very important to make backups of your website and database as sometimes the web hosting provider you’re with may run into natural disasters or may close down your account indefinitely without any notification.

To setup automatic backups you can set up cron jobs or ask your hosting provider. Make sure the files are saved in secondary or even a third source that is managed separately from your hosting provider.

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Why you should invest in a secondary DNS service

10 years ago

Some down times are related to DNS (Domain Name Server) problems. By investing in a secondary DNS service, you can protect your network and eliminate downtime. Secondary DNS services are a great solution to DNS problems and will not leave a dent in your pocket. Some secondary DNS services sell at $40 per year. You may also be able to find some free secondary DNS solutions on the web.

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Why you should use a monitoring service like Google Analytics

10 years ago

A free tool you can use that can help you monitor your website when it goes down is Google Analytics. With intelligence alerts, it can send you a text message or e-mail you when your site reaches a threshold. For instance you can set it to notify you when you have 0 real-time visitors on your website or if it drops dramatically. Setup custom alerts to notify you if your website is not receiving visitors.

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What is Google Webmaster Tools?

10 years ago

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Google Webmaster Tools allows you to check the indexing status of your website and gives you advice on how to optimize your site for better visibility. GWT is the standard tool to monitor your website’s performance. If you haven’t signed up for it yet, we really recommend this tool for every webmaster who wants to stay on top of things.

To get started with GWT, visit: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

By using GWT, you can improve your site’s performance by:
• Making sure that Google can access your content.
• Submitting new content for crawling and removing content you don’t want shown in search results.
• Optimizing how your results are shown so that it is more visually appealing to searchers.
• Monitoring your site for malware or spam issues so your website is clean.

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How do I add my website to GWT?

10 years ago

Visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard and click on the Add site now button.
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Type in the URL of your website and click continue.
Verify that you own the site by downloading the HTML verification file and uploading it to your root folder. Once you have uploaded the file, click on Verify.

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The site dashboard on GWT

10 years ago

The site dashboard gives you the current status of crawl errors, search queries and sitemaps (if you’ve added any). It will also show you the new messages and critical issues of your website at the top of the page.
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Pay attention to the site errors such as DNS, Server connectivity and Robots.txt. Also have a look at the URL Errors you might have under the Crawl Errors section.

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Why viewing the “site messages” is important?

10 years ago

Viewing the site messages lets you stay up to date with how your website is performing. Site messages will let you know if Googlebot can’t access your site or other critical issues. It is good to stay on top of things by viewing the site messages of your website

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What is “Structured Data” and “Data Highlighter” in GWT?

10 years ago

If you click on the Search Appearance tab on the side bar of GWT, you’ll see links for Structured Data and Data Highlighter.
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Structured data markup lets you add extra data on your pages as it is shown in the Google search results. For instance, IMDB.com attaches movie ratings and # of votes as such:
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By going to Structured Data in GWT, you can see the different data types you’ve marked, the # of pages that have marked up data and the items with errors.
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By using the Data Highlighter tool, you can mark data on your pages that will teach Google about the pattern of structured data on your website. The supported data types are:
• Articles
• Events
• Local businesses
• Restaurants
• Products
• Software applications
• Movies
• TV Episodes
• Books

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What is “HTML Improvements” in GWT?

10 years ago

If you click on the Search Appearance tab on the side bar of GWT, you’ll see a link for HTML Improvements.
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HTML Improvements shows you which meta descriptions, title tags and non-index-able content needs to be addressed by the webmaster to improve the site’s user experience and performance.
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In the sample data above, there are 233 duplicate meta tags and 33,224 duplicate title tags that should be addressed for this website example.

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