Your homepage fails with a server error

Why it matters

Google's crawlers slow down when a site answers with server errors, and indexed pages that keep failing are eventually dropped. Google also ignores any content that comes with a 5xx response.

What to do

1. Open your homepage now; if it works, the failure may have been brief, so check your host's error logs for the time of the audit.
2. If it still fails, ask your developer or host to look at the server, the application and any CDN in front of it.
3. Run a new audit once the homepage answers normally.

What we read

Our crawl starts at your site's address and follows up to ten redirects. When the homepage's first answer is a server error, a 429 or a dropped connection, we request it once more after a short pause, or after the delay the server asks for, up to 60 seconds.

The homepage is reported when both answers are 5xx; the two codes may differ, and the finding reports the last. A server error followed by a success is not reported, a final 429 is noted as incomplete coverage, and a homepage that gives no answer at all, such as a timeout, cannot be checked.

Example & evidence

Illustrative example — the homepage read twice in one audit, not a live audit.

GET https://bakery.example/
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
Retry-After: 5

GET https://bakery.example/
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable

The first answer asked us to wait five seconds, and the retry failed as well. The finding records HTTP status: 503 with both attempts.

If the retry had answered 200 OK, there would be no finding.

Confirm & check again

Check for yourself: open your homepage in a browser and in a private window, and ask your host for error logs from the time of the audit.

Check again: Full audit — run a new audit of the site; it requests the homepage again, with one retry. The finding is confirmed fixed only when that audit is complete: not cut short by its page limit, with every address it found fetched and answered 200, and none refused by robots.txt.

Limits & sources

Two requests a moment apart show the failure during the audit, not how long it lasted; planned maintenance can cause it too. They carry our own user agent, so what Googlebot or visitors received may differ, and the cause is not identified.

Confidence: High because both requests failed with a server error; a single failure is not reported.

Sources

• Google, How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlers — says server errors make Google's crawlers slow down, that content sent with a 5xx is ignored, and that indexed pages that keep failing are eventually dropped. Checked 25 September 2026.

Editorial review: 29 September 2026

Related

• A page fails with a server error — the same two-request test for the other pages of the site.
• robots.txt fails with a server error — robots.txt, not the homepage, fails with a server error.
• robots.txt blocks your homepage — the homepage is not fetched at all, because robots.txt forbids it.