While managing a WordPress website, there might be a situation where you’ll need to update some elements on the website. These updates can include repairing a bug, upgrading features or any other similar major changes. It might be difficult to complete these tasks if your website users or visitors are opening the website. So, you need to temporarily stop them to use the website and notify about it. This is called WordPress maintenance mode.
Generally, the WordPress maintenance mode is shown with a maintenance page to notify the users. So, we’ll be showing you how to put your website into WordPress maintenance mode here in this article. Along with it, we’ve also added some tips to make the WordPress maintenance mode more effective for your audience as well as for you. But before that, let’s move on to why it is essential to your website.
Why do you need the WordPress Maintenance Mode?
It is always better to give all the vital information to the website visitors that they need. So when your website under maintenance and if they are not able to access it, then it’s better to notify them beforehand. This will show your care and concern for your loyal users when they try to find you. Rather than just embedding the default error pages of the web browsers, you can notify them with a WordPress maintenance mode page. In case of any new visitors or the ones anticipating your site to be Live, Maintainance Pages can serve as the informative page where you can leave in the details.
Furthermore, if your website is undergoing major changes with themes, logos, and features, you can add in an additional message to let them know. Adding in the date and the time your site will next be Live comes in more handy as well. All of these are essential when it comes to keeping your loyal users and encouraging new ones to stay instead of looking for a substitute.
You can add in tons of features that might be helpful even though your website is under maintenance. For example, you can add newsletter subscriptions in your WordPress maintenance mode page. Through this, you can notify them through emails as soon as the bug repairs or upgrades are completed. They can then use your website immediately. Similarly, you can also put your social media links in the WordPress maintenance mode page. So, the users can view the contents of your social media until the maintenance is finished.
Now that we know the importance of the maintenance mode, let us move on to how to create one in your WordPress website.
How to convert your Website into WordPress Maintenance Mode?
The simplest way to put your website into WordPress maintenance mode is by installing a WordPress maintenance plugin. For this demonstration, we’ve used the Maintenance Page plugin developed by Themegrill. This plugin has all the basic necessities and customizable features that you need in your WordPress maintenance mode page. So, you can set up a maintenance page with no time. To add it, first, you need to install and activate the plugin.
Then go to Settings>>Maintenance Page of your dashboard. Here, you’ll see all the configuration settings that you’ll need for your WordPress maintenance mode page. You can change many things like activation, logo, heading title, text message, background image, etc. to your WordPress maintenance mode page. Make all the necessary changes you want. Once you’re done, click on Save Changes.
You’ll be able to see your maintenance page once you open your website.
Tips to make your WordPress Maintenance Mode Page more effective:
Now that we have shown you how to put your website into WordPress maintenance mode, here are some ideas that you can implement in your Maintenance page to make it more effective and efficient to you.
1. Being funny always works:
You can always use humor to engage your website with the audience. This would be quite entertaining for the audience too instead of reading a boring WordPress maintenance mode page. They will surely find it interesting to see a change in the content of your website for once. But this might not be true if you own a humor associated website.
2. Make it look similar to the main website:
Even though you change the content to humor based, your viewers might prefer it in the default layout of the main website for the WordPress maintenance mode. This can preserve the look and feel of the website even though it is in the maintenance mode.
3. A short description:
Your viewers will always appreciate a short description for your WordPress maintenance mode. They don’t need to know the details on why your website is on maintenance. You just need to mention the reason and inform them that it will be solved as soon as possible. You can also put the estimated time of completion of the maintenance to make your viewers calm about it.
4. Keep it helpful:
You can put various useful information for your viewers on the maintenance page. These might include recommended contents, social media links, and other useful links. You can also add a newsletter subscription so that they can be notified when the website operates smoothly.
5. Make it attractive:
You can use a number of customization options to make your Maintenance page look beautiful. You can do this by changing background images, text fonts, or even adding logos.
Then, your maintenance page can look something like this:
Concluding:
Here, we have provided you with the information on how to put your website into WordPress maintenance mode with some effective tips. We hope that now you can make a fully functioning maintenance page with the help of the Maintenance Page without any problems. Furthermore, you can develop a very creative maintenance page with the help of this plugin. We hope that you found this article helpful. Here are some more articles that you might find interesting.
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