How to Properly Put a WordPress Website into Maintenance Mode

When you’re making changes to your website it’s best to disable it, so you don’t leave visitors with a bad impression. But how do you make sure they don’t just assume your site is permanently down or the URL is wrong?

That’s where WordPress maintenance mode comes in handy! 🚧

Maintenance mode (aka “under construction” mode) restricts your website from being viewed by other people by displaying a maintenance notice and you get to modify your website in peace.

How do you go about properly putting your website into maintenance mode? In this tutorial, you will learn the nifty details about along with the easiest ways to enable maintenance mode.

So What Exactly Is Maintenance Mode in WordPress?

Before we go straight to the methods, you must be wondering how does maintenance mode work?

As you’re modifying your site, chances are you’ll be going through some trial and error. Your website could crash, break completely or slow down.

Either way, it’s not a pleasant sight for your visitors. Not to mention, it may result in a bad impression for your brand and an increased bounce rate, resulting in lower SEO rank.

To avoid that, WordPress maintenance mode lets you display a custom notice whenever your website is in maintenance. You can let your visitors know what’s going on, and where to reach you in the meantime.

Sure, you can also make your site private by password protecting it for the time being. However, search engines can’t crawl password-protected pages, so your SEO ranking may suffer if you do this for a long period of time.

That’s why enabling WordPress maintenance mode is arguably your safest bet. It lets both your visitors and search engines know that your website is just temporarily unavailable.

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Now, that you know the benefits of WordPress maintenance mode, it’s time to try and activate it yourself! There are two ways you can go about this: manually, or with plugins.

Enabling Maintenance Mode with Plugins

Creating and enabling maintenance/under-construction mode on your WordPress site through a plugin is undeniably the most convenient option. Here are two of the best plugins options to do that:

Enabling Maintenance Mode Manually

If you prefer to do things by hand, you can easily enable maintenance mode by editing your .htaccess or functions.php files. Let’s take a closer look under the hood, shall we:

Manual option #1: Adding a Code Snippet to functions.php This can be done directly through your WordPress admin area:

1. Login to your dashboard and navigate to Appearances > Themes Editor.
2. Next, locate the Theme Functions (functions.php) file on the right menu bar.
3. Copy and paste the following code snippet to the very bottom of the file, but before the closing ?> tag if there’s any:

// Activate WordPress Maintenance Mode
function wp_maintenance_mode() {
	if (!current_user_can('edit_themes') || !is_user_logged_in()) {
		wp_die( "<h1>Under Maintenance<‌/h1><br>Website under planned maintenance. Please check back later." );
	}	
}
add_action( 'get_header', 'wp_maintenance_mode' );

That’s it! All you need to do next is modify the messages and click Update File.

Important: always make it a habit to have a back up of your website before making any changes, and to make changes through child themes to avoid any errors and permanent data loss.

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Manual option #2: Editing the .htaccess File You can also manually set up a custom maintenance page and redirect your site’s homepage to it by editing your .htaccess file. This can be done through the File Manager of your hosting account or a free FTP client like FileZilla.

Let’s look closer at how you can add the necessary edits via a File Manager:

1. Access the File Manager of your hosting provider to open your website’s root directory.
2. Locate your .htaccess file and right-click to Rename it. Here we’re using .htaccess_default as an example.
3. Create a new .htaccess file, then add the following lines to it. Change the example.com to your domain name.

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance\.html$
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/maintenance.html [R=307,L]
   

4. Now, create a new maintance.html file with your message in it. If you’re not sure how to do it, simply use a free maintance.html template like this one.
5. Copy-paste the code to the maintenance.html file, then make changes as needed.

And that’s it! When you access your website, a maintenance page should appear instead of your usual homepage. To exit maintenance mode simply restore the original .htaccess file.

Note: The first step above is a must if you don’t want to break anything on your website when you reactivate it.

Final Words

In this tutorial, you’ve learned several simple ways to put your WordPress site into maintenance mode. Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve been talking about:

• Enable and design your own WordPress maintenance page with the Coming Soon Page by SeedProd.
• Activate maintenance mode through the WP Maintenance Mode plugin.
• Enable and create a maintenance page manually by editing the .htaccess file through a File Manager.
• Add code to the functions.php file to enable the default WordPress maintenance mode message.

After you complete the steps provided above, you’ll be able to make changes on your website without inconveniencing your audience. No more fear of losing website visitors and SEO rankings!