Coming soon or maintenance mode is single page shown to users for different reasons. May be you are preparing a new site for launching or you are troubleshooting an existing site. In such cases, you should show a coming soon or maintenance mode page to users to avoid them seeing unnecessary details. Also, this is required to avoid search engines indexing your raw data before it is ready for publishing. If you are also using Weebly, learn how to create maintenance mode page for Weebly site?
When to Use Maintenance Mode?
Creating a website needs lot of time. It is unlikely you can create all the content in few hours and launch the entire site. Most of the time, you may need to many days or even months to launch a new website depending the size. The best option here is to create a staging site and start creating your content. Alternatively, you can create localhost website and move to live WordPress site when you are ready.
However, not all webhosting companies offer staging feature and you may not have much time to create local site. The solution here is to create a live WordPress installation and setup a coming soon page till the time your content is ready for publishing.
On other hand, many reasons your live site needs to be taken down like planned maintenance, troubleshooting or migration purposes. In this case, you should setup a maintenance mode page to inform users about the activity and the expected time when your site will be back online. The good part is that you can use single plugin for showing either coming soon or maintenance mode. Alternatively, use a custom code snippet without plugin or use theme options if it is available in your theme.
1. Maintenance Mode with Plugin
Login to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to “Plugins > Add New” section. Search for “coming soon” to find “Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode by SeedProd” plugin. Install and activate the plugin.
Surprisingly, the plugin has 900k+ active installations. We wonder why so many active installations are not going live.
Setup Coming Soon or Maintenance Mode
Though the plugin name is very long, it has simple settings. After activation, click on the “Settings” link under the plugin name or go to the menu item “SeedProd” in the dashboard. Though you will see different tabs on the settings page, you only need setup under “Content Tab”. Most of the options in other tabs like design and subscribers are for pro users. Similarly, except “Settings” menu, all other options for only pro users.
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License Key
The free version does not need any license key. If you want to explore more then purchase the premium version for the price of $29.60 per year for one website. You will get 20% discount on this price when purchased through your WordPress dashboard link.
General Settings
Here you can enable coming soon or maintenance mode. Remember, you will still see the site’s content when you logged in. You should log out or use different browser to see the coming soon page.
Page Settings and Header
You can setup the following details:
- Add a logo to show on your page.
- Headline and message for your page. Remember to add message relevant for coming soon or maintenance mode.
- Add favicon, title, meta description and analytics code under “Header” section.
Viewing Live Preview
Save all your changes and click on the “Live Preview” tab. It will open a new page showing the preview of your coming soon or maintenance mode page.
Additional Options
- You can setup a background image, setup image parameters and add CSS under “Design” tab.
- By default, the plugin will exclude login, admin and dashboard pages to avoid lock out of your site. However, you can disable this to include admin pages to show maintenance mode under “Advanced” tab. If you enable this option, then you may need to disable the plugin through FTP to login to your site.
- “Advanced” section also has options to add header and footer scripts on your page.
2. WP Maintenance Mode Without Plugin
Instead of using a plugin, you can insert the following code snippet in your theme’s functions.php file. This is will enable a simple and quick maintenance mode.
function maintenace_mode() {
if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_themes' ) || !is_user_logged_in() ) {
die('Maintenance.');
}
}
add_action('get_header', 'maintenace_mode');Learn more about editing functions.php file and it should look like below:
After updating functions.php file, make sure to logout of your WordPress admin panel. Open the site’s home or any other page in the browser and you should see a quick maintenance message like below.
3. Using Theme’s Options
Most of the premium themes have a built-in maintenance mode feature which you can use instead of the plugin. For example, the popular Highend theme offers coming soon mode as a module that you can enable whenever you need.
Important Points to Remember
Remember the following points when you setup coming soon or maintenance mode in your site:
- Showing coming soon or maintenance mode will hide all the pages on your site.
- Regardless of the page, all users, except admin, will see a coming soon or maintenance mode page.
- You can still view the pages when logged in to admin panel as an administrator.
- If you want to have a new product launch then ensure to create a new post or page and setup countdown timer.
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