Site Maintenance

[jcodemasters]

Hi,
Last time I performed maintenance on my website and during this period all users were redirected to maintenance page including robot. I saw some where to add revisit in meta tag but google did not pick up and generated lots of error. This time I want to avoid these errors, please suggest me know what should I do to safely perform maintenance on my website.

Thanks

[tonynoriega]

why are you directing them to a maintenance page? just create a index2.html page how you want it, when your ready, overwrite index.html and call it good... there should be no reason you direct your users to a "maintenance" page... just get er done... i do changes on the fly all the time and it works fine...

work up a dummy page, and when its ready deploy it to the live server. done deal.

[jcodemasters]

what if you have dynamic site, it wont work. I got a great way to do it using php. Here is the method if you have similar problem like I had

put it in the header or the first file you are calling from script
if($site_down) {
header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Status: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Retry-After: 3600'); //in seconds
}

[thecoalman]

Setup a local server like XAMPP....

[tonynoriega]

what tool are you using to create and develop your site?

[jcodemasters]

its custom site, I safely turned off site using above method and restored after 10 hours no google robot errors this time :)