Pausing Store for Vacation (using Password Protect Mode) - and its impact on Organic Google Traffic

[LinBow]

Hi! Does anybody know what happens to a website's SEO (and Google organic traffic) when a Shopify store is set on vacation mode using "Password Protected", say, for the period of 2 weeks while the team is on vacation?

More specifically, what happens to the traffic to popular site pages and blogs? And does Google penalize the website during the pause? Any help is appreciated!

Thank you!

[SomeUsernameHe]

Yes, unfortunately, if you password-protect your site it will not allow Google to crawl your site and you will lose your rankings. This is a really tough choice, so I would recommend doing a lot of external research on this subject just so you know the pros and cons of password-protecting your site. Someone might have some recommendations but if It was me, I would not close the site, just put a message on the site and change the shipping dates to reflect the two week break period. 

[LinBow]

Thank you so much for the quick reply and for your helpful perspective. Shopify provides a window of 7 days for us merchants to complete an order before it is automatically cancelled if not fulfilled. So is there a way to pause the Checkout process only (instead of pausing the store?).