The Connection Status Lamp is a red, amber, or green indicator that reports whether a saved set of domain credentials is incomplete, saved but untested, or successfully tested and ready to use.
| Term | Connection Status Lamp |
|---|---|
| Category | APIs, Reliability and Publishing |
| Also known as | Status Lamp |
| Where it appears | Experiments and Site Builder domain tables |
What it means in RankGear
The Connection Status Lamp sits beside each domain row in the Experiments and Site Builder tables, where RankGear stores the credentials it uses to reach a publishing target such as an FTP, FTPS, or CMS endpoint. Rather than making you open a settings panel to learn whether a connection will work, the lamp condenses that state into a single colored dot: red means the credential set is incomplete or missing a required field, amber means the details are saved but have not yet been verified against the live host, and green means RankGear has run a test connection and the host accepted it. It is a status readout, not a control — the color reflects the last thing RankGear knows about the target, not a live heartbeat.
How to interpret it
Read the lamp as a three-state gate before you rely on a domain for publishing. Amber is the state that catches people out: it does not mean the connection is broken, only that it is unproven, so treat an amber row as untested rather than trusting or discarding it. When a test fails, use the accompanying diagnostics to separate a transient problem from a configuration problem — a timeout or a refused connection can be worth one bounded retry, whereas an authorization or permission error points at wrong credentials and will not fix itself on a repeat attempt. Green tells you the target responded correctly at test time; it is not a guarantee the host will stay reachable, so re-test after you change any field.
| Color | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Red | Credential set is incomplete — a required field is missing or invalid. |
| Amber | Details are saved but untested; the connection is unproven. |
| Green | RankGear tested the credentials and the host accepted them. |
Example
You add a staging domain to a Site Builder table and paste in its FTPS host, username, and password, but leave the port blank. The lamp shows red until you supply the port, then turns amber the moment the row is saved. You click test: the host times out once, RankGear allows a single longer retry, and this time the login succeeds, so the lamp turns green. A second domain in the same table returns an authorization failure instead — RankGear stops there rather than hammering the host with repeated paid or rate-limited calls, and the lamp stays red with a credential error you can act on.
Important considerations
- The lamp reflects the result of the last test, not a continuous connection monitor — a host can go offline after a green result, so re-test when reliability matters.
- Connection tests touch real remote publishing targets and credentials; keep tests read-only where possible and make sure secrets stay redacted in any diagnostics or exported reports.
- A failed test is a signal to diagnose, not to retry blindly: distinguish a transient network failure, which may warrant one bounded retry, from an invalid configuration, which will keep failing until the credentials are corrected.
- The color is an operational readiness indicator for a specific target, not a quality or ranking signal — it says nothing about how a published page will perform in search.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.