While doing SEO for a website, it is essential to keep track of the website’s uptime or we can say downtime status.
That is because monitoring a website’s downtime helps you to better analyze the SEO efforts you have taken for a website in a particular time period.
So, in this article, I am going to explain the importance of website’s downtime tracking in the context of SEO as well as how to track a website’s downtime status via Google Search Console.
Importance of Website’s Downtime Tracking
Let’s understand this in terms of Data. Let’s say your website gets 1M clicks per month (in GSC).
Now, the slice of this one million traffic is not consistent which means every minute, your website won’t get ~24 clicks (if we divide 1M by 43200 minutes).
Instead, the traffic is distributed which means your website may get more clicks during daytime in comparison to evening and so on.
But for sake of understanding it easier, lets say your website gets ~24 clicks per minute. However, in a month, your website goes down for 8 hours (~480 minutes), then how many clicks did it miss? Around 11520 clicks.
Now, while analyzing the SEO stats, if you don’t have the knowledge of website downtime status, then you may not identify the reason for losing these 11520 clicks.
Hence, while doing SEO for a website, it is important to keep track of the website’s downtime status as well.
Note: From Downtime Monitoring I mean the status of server connectivity.
How does Google Search Console test Website’s Downtime Monitoring?
We know Google Search Console as a tool to monitor and improve website’s performance.
But have you ever thought of using it to monitor your website’s server downtime?
Well yes, you can monitor a website’s downtime status via Google Search Console and it is absolutely free.
There are plenty of website downtime/uptime monitoring software out there in the market that provides advanced features like notifying you when your website goes down, it gives you the exact time when your website goes down and many other advanced features. Some of the best ones I know are GeoClarity (value for money), Brightlocal(big name but costly).
While there are many third party tools out there (giving you several advanced features), however, Google Search Console is the best free reliable tool to monitor website downtime.
When you insert Google Search Console code in the website, its crawler pings the website from time to time. And in that time if the website goes down, it reports the same in the GSC dashboard.
With GSC, you can check for how many times your website’s server connectivity losses. And, due to that server disconnectivity, the percentage of failed crawl requests.
How to check a website’s Downtime in Google Search Console?
- Open Google Search Console
- Visit Settings > Crawl Stats
- Now, Open the Hostname you want to check
