How to Activate Maintenance Mode in WordPress Website

You probably have some great ideas to introduce or want to fix some issues on your website. Here in this article, will show you how to Activate Maintenance Mode in WordPress by using some free plugins.

By activating Maintenance Mode you can show your users a friendly message instead of annoying errors or half build pages.

You can activate Maintenance Mode in WordPress Website by applying some clicks. Before moving forward I would like to inform you that there is a difference between Maintenance and Coming Soon pages.

Difference Between Maintenance and Coming Soon Pages

When you activate Maintenance Mode in WordPress Website, you are going to tell the google that “Hi google don’t index me come back after a week, month or year”. In Maintenance Mode, you do not allow Google to index your pages because you are fixing your website. But in the Coming Soon page, it’s completely different.

When you activate Coming Soon Mode on your WordPress Website, you are going to tell the google that ” Hi google my website ready you can index it, I’m just adding some more stuff”. In Coming Soon mode you links always ready to index in google.

Advantages and Disadvantages

By activating these two modes on your website you can maintain your website easily. You can also add count down timer on your page to tell peoples when the website will be ready.

As you know google reads the mind of peoples (by reading their searches). People write their blogs with their full potential, to a ready pay attention and spend time on his/her website, which stay time increases the website’s ranking in google.

By Activating Maintenance or Coming Soon Mode on your WordPress website you may lose your website’s attention. There are millions of websites that provide great content, your website is not the only one keep this in mind. If your services are not available on time, a visitor could shift to another one and you can lose your ranking.

Plugins to Activate Maintenance Mode in WordPress Website

There are thousands of plugins that you can use to create a maintenance page or Coming Soon page. Every plugin has it’s own limitations, some of these plugins let you control full page and some of them just let you put the template with limited features (limited editing features for page).

Here is the List of Some Plugins  to Create a Coming Soon Page

I will personally recommend you to use Elementor Page Builder to Activate Maintenance Mode in WordPress Website because this plugin provides you full control on the page. You can customize your page as you want.

You can also import thousands of templates and edit them according to your desire. In other words, the Elementor Page Builder plugin is more flexible than other plugins.

Activate Maintenance Mode Using Elementor Page Builder

1) Login to your admin dashboard and move to the plugins section.

2) Click on Add new.

3) Search for Elementor Page Builder, install it and activate the plugin.

4) Go to Elementor Plugin=>Tools and click on Maintenance Mode.

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5) Go to Templates=>Add New to Create a Template.

6) Edit the template with Elementor.

7) Edit the template from scrap or just import already designed templates by the Elementor team. There are hundreds of free templates of different pages designed by the professional to make this easy for you, you can use them.

8) Use any of the free.

9) Click “Insert“.

10) Edit the text, add anything you want.

11) Click on the update to update the template page.

12) Now go back to the WordPress Dashboard.

13) Click on Elementor=>Tools, in tools section Choose Mode (Maintenance Mode)=> Who Can Access (Logged In)=> Choose Template (Maintenance Mode).

14) Save the Changes.

Now your Maintenance Mode is activated. Same is the working with Coming Soon Page. Now you’re all of visitors will face the maintenance page.

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Activate Maintenance Mode Using Coming Soon Builder

1) Login to your admin dashboard and move to the plugins section.

2) Click on Add new.

2) Install the Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode – Coming Soon Builder as you installed the Elementor Page Builder.

3) Here in Activating Maintenance Mode on your WordPress Website using Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode – Coming Soon Builder, you can also get free themes.

4) To activate the Maintenance Mode, go to the basic panel and click on “Enable Maintenance Mode?“.

5) Now Maintenance Mode is activated.

You can also customize your own page in the Basic panel Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode – Coming Soon Builder is a good plugin but if we compare this plugin with Elementor, I would like to say that this plugin is very limited.

Maintenance Mode Using CMP – Coming Soon & Maintenance Plugin

CMP – Coming Soon & Maintenance Plugin is also one of the good plugins. This plugin also includes some free themes to activate and countdown styles.

1) Install the plugin and activate it.

2) Select a theme from the Available Theme.

3) Click on the “Content” section. You can add some text and description on-page through the “Content” Section.

4) Write down the details that you want to write.

5) Enable the CMP Status.

Here in this plugin, you can add Maintenance page or Coming Soon page on Whole website, Home Page Only and Whitelist/Blacklist. By using this plugin you can add any page on maintenance or Coming Soon mode.

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Activate Maintenance Mode Using WP Maintenance Mode Plugin

WP Maintenance Mode plugin allows you, to have full access to the website during the Maintenance Mode if you are the administrator. This means that you can see your website and make changes to it.

You can also add the online chat feature on the page by using this plugin. That’s a unique feature and I liked it personally.

1) Install and activate the plugin.

2) After activating the plugin go to the plugin settings, which contains 5 tabs.

3) If you want to allow search engines like Google or Bing to index your site and throw it in the search results, even you are in Maintenance Mode, just click on “Yes” of “Bypass for search bots” option.

4) WP Maintenance Mode plugin allows you to add a Content-based page. Click on the “Design” tab and add the desired text. Don’t forget to “Save Settings“.

5) Click on the “Models” tab to use the “Show countdown, Start date, Countdown (remaining time), Color, Subscription, Social Networks, Contact, and Google Analytics, ” Settings.

6) You can activate the chatbox on the page by clicking on the “Manage Bot” tab.

7) You can add a complaint feature to activate this feature click on the “GDPR” tab and fill the Privacy Policy details.

You can Activate Maintenance Mode on your WordPress Website without a plugin by applying other methods. If you want to use these methods, I will recommend you put the backup of your website.

There are also many plugins in the market to make back up of your website. I’m going to tell you 2 methods, by using these two methods you can add a maintenance page on your website, without using any plugin.

It’s easy to Activate Maintenance Mode in your WordPress Website. But after modifying the website and try to turn off maintenance mode WordPress fails to delete the maintenance file some people face this issue. Follow this article to solve WordPress stuck in maintenance mode.

Activate Maintenance Mode Using IgniteUp Plugin

IgniteUp is also a good plugin to activate Coming Soon or Site Offline mode. Unfortunately, IgniteUp plugin do not provide themes option, but you can add some feature and create a good looking Coming Soon page with limitations.

1) Install the plugin and activate it.

2) The activation will lead you to the “General Tab” settings of the plugin where you can Enable and Disable the Coming Soon or Site Offline page. In the general tab, you can also Skip Page for selected individuals like Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and subscriber, etc.

You can also skip the desired URL for maintenance mode. Here in general tab you can also skip the page (Maintenance mode page) for your desired IP addresses. You can add the title for the page and also can design the theme by using your codes.

3) After the general tab, you can go to the “Template Options” tab, where you can add Launch Date, Launch Time, Background Color, Background Image, Font Color, Title Top Text, Subtitle Text, Paragraph Text, Button Font Color, Button Background Color, and Rocket Animation to your page.

4) After Template Options you can go to the “Options” tab, where you can add Subscribe Button Text, Thank you message after a successful subscription, Error message for invalid email addresses, Message to display if the user has already subscribed and Get an email when a user has subscribed feature on your Maintenance or Coming soon page.

5) You will also get the “Integration” tab, where you can send your subscribers to your desired  like MailChimp mailing server and many more.

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Activate Maintenance Mode on your WordPress Website using Rocket Maintenance Mode & Coming Soon Page

Here in this plugin, you can’t add free themes you have to buy the premium version, this is the main issue that every non-tech will face. But there are some options by using them you can create a Maintenance or Coming soon page.

1) After installing the plugin you will get different tabs with different functionalities.

2) In “Settings >> General” tab, you will get Enable Maintenance Mode, Enable Progress Bar, Set Progress bar Percentage %, Enable Countdown Timer, Set Date/Time For Counter and Show Subscribe Form functionalities. You can arrange them as you want.

3) You can add Logo, Notification Bar, Headline, Tagline and Message in the “Page” tab.

4) Next in the “Header” tab you can add Favicon, SEO Title, SEO Meta Description, and Analytics Code to your page.

5) By using Rocket Maintenance Plugin you can also add social icons on your page. “Social icons” tab.

6) You can also create a custom design by using “Design” tab.

7) You can also disable the Maintenance Mode you the user roles like Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber.

Using these free plugins to create Maintenance of Coming soon page you will obviously face the limitations. These limitations affect mostly the non-Tec users who don’t know anything about code. That’s why I recommended you in the first to use the Elementor Page Builder plugin to gain good features.

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Using a Custom Function

The 2nd method may be a little bit technical. But, don’t worry. Why I’m writing this? Only for your friends. I know, what on your mind, but don’t worry its easy. You just have knowledge about your Cpanel.

You can put your WordPress website on Maintenance Mode manually without any plugins (Customization also). Add these lines in the end of your theme’s functions.php file.

Change the text in 4th line to deliver your message.

Using .htaccess File

It’s very important to note that by using this method, you will lose access to your WordPress dashboard, all requests by you or other users will be redirected to the maintenance.html file.

You can search you .htaccess file in your directory by using your cPenal. Rename your live .htaccess file to .htaccess_default and build a new file named .htaccess and add the given code below:

Now create a maintenance.html with your message in directory. I hope that you liked my article and have some questions for me. I will be very happy to answer those questions, just comment below if you have any question.

Closing Thoughts

With the end of the article, I would like to advise you that the maintenance page of Coming Soon page should be simple and attractive to the audience so they may read it and like to visit again. The heavy wording and adding too much stuff can lose the visitor’s attention.

The maintenance or Coming Soon page should be Short and Sweet, Be Compassionate, Familiar, attractive Look and Feel, Progress and Updates or Special Events.