“Under Construction.” “Coming Soon.” “Pardon our appearance while we’re renovating.” BIG mistakes.
We’ve all seen it. We go to a website looking for information or products, and we’re presented with an “Under Construction,” “Pardon our appearance during renovation,” “This Web page is parked for FREE” text and not much more — no company information, no shingle with any contact info. Nothing. Or, even worse is the dreaded “Site not available” generic server response. So what do your viewers do? Do they do a Google search to find your phone number, or do they just get frustrated, leave and seek out a competitor, not likely to return? In addition, you will lose all of your search engine traffic — Google and Bing do not like pages that go nowhere and may drop your pages from their searches. When your new site is finally live, you will be starting from scratch.
You know you need to update your website, but you’re afraid the above will happen to you and you’ll lose potential business in the process of trying to improve the viewer’s experience. So you do nothing. Well, here’s the thing, you actually do have another choice.
It’s called a “staging site.”
A staging site is a sub-site of your current website that’s hidden from view, such as “www.yoursite.com/staging.” Your current site stays “live” while your new site is designed, developed, evolved and refined, tweaked, prodded and poked at, user- and functionally-tested. The result is no down time, no visitor turned off or away, no potential lost revenue or customers, no Google, Bing or other search engine crawl failures, no lost SEO value to your pages and content. You can include a statement on your current site for visitor to “come back soon” and “see the latest and greatest offerings, services, products, mobile-friendliness,” and other “refreshments” to come.
Once the staging site is fully tested and approved, the live site is backed up and archived. Then the staging site gets swapped with the live site. And voila, within a matter of minutes the transfer is done. Yes, some minor glitches can happen in the process, which is why the transfer should always be done during off-peak hours when your site has the least amount of traffic. The new site is then retested, any glitches are fixed, and page address “redirects” are created to forward previous pages to their newly named pages (we’ll have more on “redirects” in another post). In most cases, the transfer and the testing can all be completed in about an hour or two.
Contact GraphicVisions to learn more about what we can do for your business website.