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Ensure your website is available and usable for everyone during COVID-19 How to ensure that the core functionality of your website is always available, accessible, secure, usable, discoverable, and fast. Apr 3, 2020 • Updated Apr 6, 2020

This page provides guidance to help ensure your website is available, accessible, secure, and usable for everyone at all times.

If you're building or maintaining a health organization website that qualifies as a national health ministry or US state-level agency, you can request to join the COVID-19 Google Search technical support group. Visit Helping health organizations make COVID-19 information more accessible to learn more.

The guidance on this page comes from a cross-functional collection of teams within Google that are shifting their short-term focus to support websites that are helping people stay safe during the COVID-19 situation. These Googlers have seen that sites are facing unprecedented increases in demand from people looking for critical information, many of whom have rarely or never used the web before. It can be a challenge to ensure sites are available during this time and accessible to all.

This guidance is a work in progress and will be updated frequently. If you have any suggestions, please file an issue, or edit this page and then open a pull request.

Availability, reliability, resilience, and stability #

If your site is seeing traffic spikes and it's failing, or you want to prevent it from failing, the guidance below can help you quickly fix problems or detect them before they become major issues.

See Network reliability for more guidance.

Focusing on accessibility is more important than ever because more people with a variety of needs are probably accessing your site. Follow the guidelines below to ensure that the core functionality of your website is accessible for everyone.

Identity, security, and privacy #

It can be tempting to take shortcuts to get critical fixes out the door, but always be careful that you are not opening up security holes in doing so. People need to access content on topics that are extremely private. Websites need to protect this sensitive user data at all costs and convince people that their personally identifiable information (PII) is safe.

See Safe and secure for more guidance.

Usability, UI, and UX #

People are relying more heavily on the web to fulfill basic needs. Many of these people don't use the web frequently. It's worthwhile to audit the usability of your site's core functionality and make sure it's as simple and easy to use as possible.

Consider adding a prominent banner (that can be removed with an X button) to the top of your website that clearly communicates service updates. Use a call-to-action in the banner to direct people to more specific resources. Consider using distinct colors and fonts that stand out from the rest of your page content. Keep your writing empathetic, focused on people's needs, and transparent about what kind of service to expect.

button) to the top of your website that clearly communicates service updates. Use a call-to-action in the banner to direct people to more specific resources. Consider using distinct colors and fonts that stand out from the rest of your page content. Keep your writing empathetic, focused on people's needs, and transparent about what kind of service to expect. Look for opportunities to minimize physical interactions in your critical user journeys (CUJs) and suggest those changes to your product team. For example, if your delivery service usually requires a signature, see if there's any way to work around that.

Double-check that your CUJs are as simple and intuitive as possible and suggest changes to your product team if you see any opportunities to improve.

Review the principles of good mobile design and try out your CUJs on various mobile devices to make sure there aren't any glaring issues. The people who don't use the web often and are suddenly finding themselves having to rely on the web more are probably accessing your site from mobile devices.

Refactor your site to use responsive design patterns as much as possible.

Ensure that your forms are efficient and well-designed.

People are looking for critical health- and job-related information. It's important to ensure that your sites are discoverable by all search engines. The Lighthouse SEO audits can help you detect basic problems. Follow the official blogs of search engines for the latest guidance and updates: Google, Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Yandex. Recent COVID-19-related posts:

See Discoverable for more guidance.

Some ISPs (in India for example) are seeing a sharp increase in home internet usage and don't have the infrastructure to meet the increased demand. In situations like this your website speed may be getting slower through no fault of your own. Optimizing your load performance could be a way to offset the headwind of reduced bandwidth. In other words, by reducing the number of bytes that need to be sent over the network in order to load your pages, you can offset the performance impact of reduced bandwidth.

See Fast load times for more guidance.

Hero image by NASA on Unsplash