Use 302 redirect when site crashes

[Kyle_M]

My company has switched to a new ecommerce platform that we are not totally familiar with yet. As we've worked with it, we've had a couple situations where both the front and back ends of our site crashed simultaneously (always after installing a third party module). The platform's built-in backup solution hasn't been an option in those situations so we've been coming up with alternatives.

We now have a duplicate of the site on our server for such emergencies. The plan is to have pages on the broken site point to the backup site using 302 redirects until the broken site is fixed.

Is this correct usage of the 302 redirect? I often see people recommend to never use 302 redirects, but I thought this might be the kind of situation where they'd be appropriate. If so, are there other SEO considerations we should keep in mind? For example, I'm wondering if we should put canonical tags on the temporary site that point to the broken site so the broken site stays in the SE indexes.

[Ray-pp]

There are a few considerations to think about here:

Each search engine treats a 302 redirect differently, so just because it could be a correct use case in one search engine, doesn't mean that it won't negatively impact you for another. This is a major reason why most SEOs do not recommend using 302 redirects, they are more harmful then beneficial.

a 302 redirect, in the situation you explained, could be a correct use case if the redirected destination was on the same domain. So, if www.thisisyourdomain.com 302 redirects to www.thisisyourdomain.com/temporary-site then it could be a correct use of the 302 redirect. However, the first point above is much more important and I wouldn't recommend doing this.

If you do want to put up a temporary site for that downtime, then I do suggest you apply canonical tags back to the original site AND you prevent search engines from indexing it entirely to be safe from duplicate content penalties. Then, I also suggest not to have a 302 redirect, but an error page that says your team is working on fixing the problem and they can use this alternate site (provide a link) in the meantime.

However, I would avoid it altogether. If your site must remain online during these unexpected downtime experiences, then it is probably because you are losing a substantial amount of revenue (e.g ecommerce websites with frequent transactions). If that is the case, then I recommend investing in a server setup that can accommodate this scenario - they can be expensive, but you're generating revenue so it should fit into someone's budget.

You can also go the route of using a CDN to deliver cached content to allow the visitor to continue to browse a cached version of the website while it is offline. You won't be able to take transactions, but if the downtime is short their experience may not be interrupted - look at Cloudflare's Forever Online feature.

If your site isn't losing revenue while offline, then improve the setup to minimize downtime, throw up a nice error page letting people know, and don't mess with those redirects.