Occasionally, we need to bring our website visitors to a maintenance page.
This might be the case during a bad website migration or if there are other breaking changes to the website. There might also be another reason, such as it is a completely new website and there is nothing to publish yet. There are also situations where the website owner needs to unexpectedly stop operations.
“Maintenance” WordPress plugin
You can easily spin up a simple maintenance page in under a minute with the Maintenance WordPress plugin. Install the plugin, configure, enable the maintenance page, and… Voila! You are all set. Click on the “Preview” button to see how it will look.
To test that the website is indeed showing the maintenance page to non logged in visitors, open the website in a Private Window or Incognito mode. Instead of the usual website pages, you should see the maintenance page.
Troubleshooting the Maintenance page
If you encounter issues seeing the maintenance page, you can try the following:
- Clear the cache in your performance plugin, such as WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, and W3 Total Cache.
- Temporarily disable preloading in your performance plugins.
- If that doesn’t help, you might consider temporarily disabling your performance plugin altogether.
