How to Put Your WordPress Site in Maintenance Mode (With & Without a Plugin)

Want to add a maintenance mode page to your WordPress website?

Adding a maintenance mode page to your site is a wonderful way to hide the broken pages from your visitors when your website is down for maintenance. It helps you tweak your website settings, theme or plugins normally in the backend of the site, without letting your visitors see the nuts and bolts that you’re using for your maintenance process.

And not just that, it’s also a great way to save your SEO by signaling search engines that your website is down for maintenance. So every time the search engines crawl your site, it will skip indexing any changes that look incomplete, ensuring that your SEO rankings remain intact.

In this article, we’ll show you how to put your WordPress website in maintenance mode. But before that, let’s quickly have a look at how this page would benefit you.

Table of Contents – Enable Maintenance Mode in WordPress

• Why Use a Maintenance Page in WordPress?
• Enable Maintenance Mode With a Plugin
• Enable Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin

Why Use a Maintenance Page on Your Website

Let’s take a look at a few benefits of the maintenance page. With a maintenance page, you can…

• hide broken pages from your visitors
• redirect your visitors to another destination when they land on your site
• ensure rankings remain intact
• collect users’ email addresses
• notify all your subscribers as soon as your site is live again
• increase your social followers

By default, WordPress offers the option to add a maintenance mode page to your website. But there’s nothing much you can do with it in terms of enhancing its visuals. And people would hate to see that page because it’s very unprofessional.

But don’t worry. You don’t have to use it anymore.

SeedProd is an amazing coming soon plugin that offers you great flexibility in terms of your maintenance page’s look and feel. So you no longer have to deal with the default plain-looking maintenance mode page that WordPress offers. Instead, you can create a striking one in just a few minutes.

Enable Maintenance Mode With a Plugin – SeedProd

SeedProd is a fully responsive and super flexible WordPress plugin that lets you design beautiful maintenance mode pages without coding a single line. You can use this plugin to create a vibrant and engaging page for your visitors to let them know that your website is down for maintenance.

From adding your brand logo to customizing every bit of your page, everything is made so simple and easy with this plugin. To engage visitors for longer, you can also add a video to this page. It also supports various other elements on the page like an email form, countdown timer, a progress bar, social icons, CTAs and more.

Having said that, let’s check out how to put your WordPress site into maintenance mode. Let’s begin.

Step 1: Install and Activate the SeedProd Coming Soon Plugin

The first step is to install and activate the SeedProd plugin in your WordPress site. If you don’t know how to install a plugin in WordPress, here’s how you can do it.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, you’ll have to validate your license key. You can find the key in your SeedProd account created at the time of purchasing the product. Paste the key in the blank field and click on the check license box to validate it.

Ideally, it should automatically take you to the “license key” page upon completing the activation process. In case it doesn’t, you can manually do it by going to your WordPress dashboard » Settings » Coming Soon Pro » License.

If you scroll down the page, you’ll find a video showing how to use the plugin.

Once done, you’re ready to start using the plugin. Now click on the Go to settings button to start creating your page.

Step 2: Select Your Theme

It’s now time to create your maintenance mode page. Upon clicking on the Go to Settings page, you’ll be taken to the following window. Here you need to select the Enable Maintenance Mode option. After that click on the Edit Coming Soon/ Maintenance Mode Page button to go to the page builder.

But before that you’ll now be able to select a theme so that you can get started right away. SeedProd offers more than 60 different fully customizable pre-built templates to choose from.

Select the theme that you like the best. Now you’ll be on the visual page builder where you can work on customizing your theme. On the left side of your screen, you’ll have the options for customization and on your right, you can preview your page. You can view your changes in the preview screen as you make the changes.

The first option is the Themes option. You can use this option to change your theme if you want. But since we have just selected a theme for our page, we’ll skip that for now and select the next option — Content.

The Content option lets you change the text on your page.

Under this option, you can customize your page name, headline, and the description. You also have the option to upload your logo under this tab. If you scroll a little downwards, you’ll see several other options as well.

If you want to change the order of your elements, simply drag and drop them in your desired order under the Section Order option. You can also add a favicon and work on your SEO title and description, social media thumbnails and add the Google Analytics code under this section itself.

Although all themes are shipped with a default background image, you can change it if you want. SeedProd comes with a library full of stock images that you can access without paying anything extra. Just click on the Select Stock Image option and choose your favorite image.

You can also use the search field to find a specific image that you want.

You can also work on the background image position and size here. To make it more engaging, you have the option to attach a video and a slideshow too.

The next option is Content Container. You can use this option to make your content container opaque or transparent whichever you think looks best. You can also position it, add animation and customize its radius.

You can also pick a color to complement the image in its background as we did here.

The next option is Element Color and Typography. We’ll skip these for now and add the elements first so we can edit them.

Step 3: Add Elements to Your Page

SeedProd offers 6 different elements to add on your page. You can easily add them and then customize their looks to match your brand. Here are the options you have.

To add an element just click on the particular option. For example, if you want to add an email option, just click on Email Form Settings and enable the form. You can then add the form width. It also has the option to let you choose an email marketing service provider. It comes with more than 23 options to choose from.

If you want to add social links, just click on social profile and select your social icon by clicking on the drop down arrow. you can then add your links and customize the button size and color.

Similarly, you can select your social share buttons, countdown timer and progress bar as well. Here’s how it looks like after adding all of them.

Step 4: Customize Your Elements Color and Typography

Now that you’ve added all the elements to your page, you can go back to the Elements Color option that’s available right below the Content Container tab.

Here you can choose your favorite color and use the tiny black bar to adjust the opacity of your elements. You can also change the color of the background of the form.

If you want to customize your text, there’s an option for that as well. So your design is almost ready now. If you want to add your custom design, you can use the Custom CSS and Advanced Scripts options for that.

Step 5: Check Responsiveness of Your Page

Now that the page is ready, the final step of your designing process is to check the responsiveness of the page. To check how it appears on the screen of different devices, just click on the Desktop and Mobile buttons.

Step 6: Publish Your Maintenance Mode Page

You are now ready to publish your page. For that, first, click on the Save button to save your settings. Now click on the Back to Settings options. This will take you to the window where you selected the enable Maintenance mode option. Now click on the Save All Changes button for the page to go live. Here’s how your page will appear to your visitors.

You can now log into the backend and continue with your maintenance task.

Enable Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin

We have created an easy code snippet that you can use to put your WordPress site to maintenance mode without a plugin.

All you have to do is add this code to your theme’s functions.php file or in a site-specific plugin:

function maintenance_mode() {

      if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_themes' ) || !is_user_logged_in() ) {wp_die('Maintenance.');}

}
add_action('get_header', 'maintenance_mode');

To disable the maintenance mode and allow users to access your website, simply comment out the last line like this:

// add_action();

So that’s how simple it is to create a maintenance page for your website. You might also want to check out the best maintenance mode plugins.