Do you want to put your WordPress site into maintenance mode?
Maintenance mode allows you to display a user-friendly notification to your visitors instead of a broken site during website maintenance.
It also allows you to safely perform all maintenance tasks while ensuring that those who need to access your website can still access it.
This article will show you how to easily put your WordPress site into maintenance mode. It also shows you how to make your maintenance mode page more pleasant, useful, and user-friendly.
Why and When to Put WordPress in Maintenance Mode
In general, you can do customizations without putting your WordPress website into maintenance mode. You can make minor adjustments, publish new content, and update themes and plugins without downtime.
However, sometimes you may need to work on a website for a longer period of time, such as manually setting a new theme or configuring a new plugin that changes the behavior of a website. During this time, the website may appear broken to users.
If your website has a lot of traffic, you don’t want your users to see the wrong website. This is because the user experience is not good and it gives a bad impression of the brand.
A common way to handle this situation is to set up a staging website. This allows you to work on your website in a test environment and push your changes to your live website when you’re done.
Some of the best WordPress hosting companies offer one-click staging websites like Bluehost, SiteGround, and WP Engine.
You need to set up maintenance mode, but it will only be done for a very short period of time.
If you are not using a staging site, you will need to put your website into maintenance mode because you will be making changes to your live website. This can solve the problem of bad user experience.
Putting your WordPress site into maintenance mode allows you to display user-friendly notifications, alternate links to visit, and provide a schedule for maintenance to be completed.
That said, let’s see how to easily put your WordPress site into maintenance or under construction mode.
I’m going to show you two different plugins for creating upcoming or maintenance mode pages. You can choose the one that suits you best.
If you prefer written instructions, read on.
- Set Up WordPress Maintenance Mode Using SeedProd Plugin
SeedProd is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to create fully customized upcoming pages, maintenance mode pages, custom 404 pages, and even full marketing landing pages. It is the best WordPress landing page builder used by over a million websites.
There is also a premium version of SeedProd that offers more premium templates, advanced customization features, and marketing integrations.
However, to put your WordPress site into maintenance mode, you only need the free version of SeedProd.
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the SeedProd plugin. For more information, see our guide on how to install plugins in WordPress.
Once the plugin is installed and activated, go to the SeedProd » page and click on ‘Set Up Maintenance Mode Page’.
The next step is to create a maintenance page that will be displayed to visitors when maintenance mode is enabled.
You need to choose a pre-made template or start from a blank one. To select a template, hover over the thumbnail and click the OK icon.
This will open the SeedProd drag and drop WordPress page builder where you can customize any element.
You can also add new content elements by dragging blocks from the left panel.
The final step is to enable WordPress maintenance mode. Simply visit the SeedProd » page on your WordPress dashboard and switch maintenance mode to ‘Active’.
You can now preview the maintenance mode page in action by visiting our website in a new incognito browser tab. Controlling website access for logged-in users By default, SeedProd displays the maintenance mode page to all non-logged visitors. Anyone with an account can log in as usual. This includes member website subscribers and online store customers. To choose who can access your website during maintenance, you need to edit the maintenance page settings. Just visit the SeedProd » page and click the ‘Edit Page’ button in maintenance mode.
