So you bought a domain…. What do you do next? Did you put up an Under Construction page and then leave it for…. Well I’m not going to say how long, because I don’t know how long the page has been up. ?

Usually, the Under Construction page can show that you took your website offline while you were working on it. This is sometimes done because the website is going through major edits so visitors can’t see the work while the editing is going on. The standard time for having this page up is 1 – 2 weeks.

But if your page has been up there longer this can impact your business.

Your website is importance because it can be the first point of contact for people. Have you contacted a business that had an unfinished website? If you haven’t, do you think your customers will?

Do you want your company associated with the frustration created by an unfinished website? Users can become frustrated because they found a link to your website but the link doesn’t provide them with any informative other than possibly your contact info. But what products or services does your company provide? How can they gauge your reputation or knowledge in your line of work?

Since under construction pages don’t usually have any content on them, this means your website isn’t giving search engines any content and they rank websites based on their content.
Now if your website has never been live, this isn’t really a problem because it never had a search engine ranking in the first place. Websites that had a good search engine ranking but were taken down for re-design can actually slip down SEO rank. In the worse case scenario, they can get removed from the search engine index entirely. This is because websites that put up pages with ‘under construction’ on them are most likely going to be ignored by search engines and moved down the ranks.

And if your website has never been live, don’t you want it to be so that you can be found easily on search engines?

So, if your website and/or webpage isn’t ready then don’t make it live. But if you need to put up a page for users to land on, please at least give contact details or provide a small amount of brief information because something is better than nothing (but don’t leave it in place for months, years, decades… You get the gist). And if you are replacing your website with an updated design then best practice is to wait until it is done before loading it up to your domain.

If you need more help making that Under Construction page into a developed website that can be found on search engines let’s chat or please send us an email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.