WordPress Tips

Maintenance mode in WordPress! How do I activate it?

How to activate maintenance mode in WordPress

Maintenance mode in WordPress is a very useful way to prevent your users from entering your website while you are working, making editing your site more convenient and informing users that changes are being made.

What is maintenance mode and what is it for?

Putting your site in maintenance mode means "closing" your website to users for a set period of time, displaying a different page.

This way, you can make changes without having to worry about ruining the user experience on your website.

As an example of this, imagine that you are changing how your posts are displayed. For this you need to change structure and styles, so if at that moment there are users browsing the site, as they navigate and change pages the structure will change, so it can create confusion. Therefore, activating maintenance mode during the duration of the change may be the solution.

How do I activate maintenance mode?

Currently WordPress does not have a maintenance mode as such, so it is best to use a plugin, which I personally recommend:

Why do I recommend it? Because in its free version it's fantastic for users who don't want to touch code, although if you have the necessary knowledge it gives you the chance to customize it even more.

Once installed, you can find the plugin settings at Settings > Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode. Once there you will find different tabs:

content section

In this first section you will be able to enable the different “closing” modes, which would be coming soon or maintenance. According to the development team, the first is intended for sites that have not yet been opened and the second for sites already in operation. You can read more about this at the article dedicated to it (In English).

In addition, in this tab you will find the basic settings to put your maintenance page up and running: Logo, Title and Message, accompanied by other small adjustments such as the favicon, the title and the SEO description and the Google Analytics code.

design section

If, in addition to these basic settings, you want to give it a touch of design, that is, make the page more cool, you can do it without having to know how to code.

Different sections will ask you to choose colors, images, different sizes of content and even add your own styles (CSS) to modify what those settings do not reach.

advanced section

If this is still not enough and you need to tweak even more things, this plugin will let you (and it's still the free version :O). In the advanced section you can tweak everything you want: Add HTML directly, add JavaScript and even choose if you want them in the header or footer.

Live preview

Finally, in the preview you will be able to see all the changes you make, so you can edit the page whenever you want without having to activate it.

And that would be all! We would already have a great maintenance page to use when we need it 🙂

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