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 the best drag and drop landing page builder for WordPress that comes with easy maintenance mode functionality. 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 enable maintenance mode pages without coding a single line. You can use this plugin to design 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, 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 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 Verify Key box to validate it.

Once the license key is validated, you’re ready to start using the plugin.

Scroll down the page and click on the Create Your First Page button. This will take you to the SeedProd dashboard where you can start creating your page.

Step 2: Set up Maintenance Mode in WordPress

It’s now time to create your maintenance mode page. At the top of the SeedProd dashboard you’ll see 4 different pages you can create: coming soon, maintenance mode, login page, and 404 page.

Click on the Set up a Maintenance Mode Page to get started.

Step 3: Select Your Theme

Upon clicking on the Set up a Maintenance Mode Page, you’ll be taken to SeedProd’s template library where you can select a theme for your maintenance mode page.

SeedProd offers more than 100 different fully customizable pre-built templates to choose from, including a number of templates specifically for maintenance mode pages.

Select the theme that you like the best. Or, you can choose the Blank template to start from scratch. To select a template, simply hover over it and click the checkmark button.

After choosing a maintenance mode template, you’ll be redirected to the visual page builder where you can work on customizing your theme.

Step 4: Customize Your Maintenance Mode Page

In SeedProd’s visual builder, you can see blocks for customizing and adding content to your page on the left side. And on your right, you can preview what your page looks like in real-time.

You can customize any existing element on your page by clicking on it. For example, you can click on the headline to change the text, font size, alignment, and more.

You can also easily add new content to your maintenance mode page using the blocks on the left side of the screen.

SeedProd offers tons of ready-made landing page blocks including:

• Buttons
• Videos
• Contact Forms
• Email Optin Forms
• Social Media Profiles
• Countdown Timers
• And Much More

Simply drag and drop the block you want onto your maintenance mode page. For example, you can add a countdown timer to your page to let visitors know when maintenance will be finished.

Again, you can click on the countdown timer to customize it. You can set the end date and time, choose the style, color, and more.

SeedProd also offers pre-built sections like FAQ, call to action, features, and others. This makes it easy to add more information to your maintenance mode page and keep your layout looking great.

To add an FAQ section, click on the Sections tab, then choose FAQ from the list on the left. You can then choose the style for your FAQ section. Hover over the style you like and click on the (+) Add button.

SeedProd will automatically add the section to your maintenance mode page. Then, you can click on the section to customize the content.

When you’re finished customizing your maintenance mode page, don’t forget to hit the Save button.

Step 5: Connect Your Email Marketing Service

If you want to add an optin form to your maintenance mode page to grow your email list, drag the Optin Form block onto the page.

Next, you’ll need to connect your email marketing service. To do that, click on the Connect tab at the top of your screen.

On this page, you can see popular email marketing providers like Constant Contact, Drip, Mailchimp, and more.

Choose your email marketing provider and click Connect. Then, fill out your account details and click Connect again.

Now, when users provide their email addresses via your maintenance mode page, they’ll be automatically added to your email list.

Step 6: Configure Maintenance Page Settings

Now that you’ve added all the elements to your page, you can go to the Page Settings tab at the top of the screen to configure a few different settings.

Here in the General settings section, you can choose a page title, set your page status, enable or disable redirect mode, and so on.

In the Access Control section, you can create a secret bypass URL to give specific people access to your site.

And in the SEO settings, you can optimize your maintenance page for SEO.

Click Save when you’re finished configuring your settings.

Step 7: 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 make sure your maintenance page looks great on screens of different devices, click on the Mobile button at the bottom of the page.

To go back to the desktop preview, just click on the button again.

As you can see, SeedProd is responsive and mobile-ready, so you can ensure your maintenance page is clear on any screen size.

Step 8: Publish and Activate 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 dropdown arrow next to the Save button and click on Publish.

You’ll then get a success message that your page is live. Click on See Live Page to see what it looks like.

Here’s an example of how your page will appear to your visitors:

Now all you have to do is activate the maintenance mode. To do that, head to SeedProd » Pages from your WordPress admin area and then go to the Maintenance Mode section.

Simply toggle the button from Inactive to Active.

That’s it, your WordPress site is in maintenance mode!

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.