WordPress maintenance mode is a state you can place your website in should you need to perform updates, implement changes to the design or content, or fix a security flaw. It essentially replaces your website with a splash page that explains why it’s offline and when you expect it to be live again.
Our reading recommendation: WordPress Maintenance: Keeping Your Website Safe And Efficient
There are many different reasons as to why you would want to put your WordPress site into maintenance mode as well as many different ways to do so. We’ll be covering all of this in this post, starting with going over what WordPress maintenance mode is and ways to put your site in this state. We’ll then cover each method you can use to enable maintenance mode before wrapping up with a few issues that can occur when you use it. Let’s get into it.
What is WordPress maintenance mode?
Reasons to use WordPress maintenance mode
How to enable WordPress maintenance mode
How to get a WordPress site out of maintenance mode
Prevent your site from getting stuck in WordPress maintenance mode
What is WordPress maintenance mode?
WordPress maintenance mode is a state you can put your website into when you need to take care of a few administrative tasks that would affect the site’s performance or otherwise make it unusable. In a perfect world, your website wouldn’t experience any downtime. However, sometimes it’s best to take your site offline and replace it with a “be back soon” splash page rather than run the risk of endangering customers’ personal data and money with a faulty website. Let’s go over a few additional purposes for WordPress maintenance mode.
Reasons to use WordPress maintenance mode
Construction / Mechanical Engineering
Image Source: WiR_Freebies – Pixabay.com / License: CC0 Public Domain
Maintenance mode is most commonly used by existing sites. Because of this, there are two main reasons for using it:
You need to make changes to your site’s design, WordPress theme or content.
You need to fix a major bug that could potentially affect your users’ data.
It may not feel like a big deal to make cosmetic changes to your site while it’s live, but it may actually throw some users off. Some may leave thinking your site is broken while others may leave thinking your site has been hacked. Some may return, but the majority will likely move on to the next site. That’s why some maintenance mode page designs come with email forms. That way you can stay in touch with your audience while your website is down.
As for the second reason, it’s always a good idea to take your site offline if it has a major security bug, even if you don’t collect user data. The logic here is that some hackers may insert links that lead to phishing sites where users have the potential to be scammed. The best thing to do is take your site offline and enable maintenance mode instead while you work out the kinks. You may turn away customers for a few hours, but at least you’ll keep your reputation. Once the issues on your site are fixed, you can put the site back online.
There is a third reason for using WordPress maintenance mode, but it relates to new sites rather than existing ones. It’s a coming soon page, and it’ll help you build hype for your yet-to-launch site. It uses the same plugins / code as maintenance mode does. You simply change the page content to indicate it’s a coming soon page rather than a general maintenance page. Let’s briefly touch base on the methods you can use to enable this feature in WordPress.
