While you are planning and designing your blog, you don't always have to be online. You can mark your blog with a maintenance mode. This means that users who open your blog address will not be able to access your blog and instead see a notice that your blog is in maintenance mode. This feature is also useful if your blog address is known, but you are not yet working on your blog or taking a break from blogging.
Why is the WordPress maintenance mode important?
When you start creating a blog, you should put it in maintenance mode. Until your blog has regular content and a clean design, you should not go online with it. Not only will you irritate your readers with a blog that's under construction, but in the worst case, you'll alienate them if they can't read regular and meaningful content yet. Before you start your blog, you should activate the hint, so that you can go online with a finished content at a later time and offer your readers material to use.
You should also Put your blog in maintenance mode even thenif you write regularly, but work on the design of the pages for a few hours or days. To ensure that your readers don't get an error message, it's helpful for readers to inform themselves and possibly return to the blog at a later date.
If your blog is hacked or otherwise disturbed, you should activate the maintenance mode for safety's sake. You can then work in peace on the website work until the error is corrected and you can go online again.
What you should definitely not do is to simply take the blog offline without giving your readers any notice. This irritates the readers and does not look professional. You should keep in mind that if you intend to continue blogging, you need to keep your readers up to date. To avoid losing readers, you should keep your readers in a Blog post or use the maintenance mode to inform you that you are working on the Internet site.
To activate the WordPress maintenance mode
To activate the maintenance mode, two possibilities are explained below:
One of the easy ways is to install one of the plugins that can be used to activate maintenance mode. Plugins are tools that allow you to perform specific tasks, automate tasks, or connect to other social media. The WP Maintenance Mode plugin is one of the tools you can use to put your blog into maintenance mode. Other plugins for Maintenance Mode are Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode by SeedProd and Coming Soon / Maintenance mode Ready.
Before you can use the plugin, you must install and activate the plugin. To do this, go to Dashboard and then to PLUGIN and then to INSTALL PLUGIN. This will open the official WordPress plugin directory and you can now search for the plugin WP Maintenance Mode or enter a different name. When you have found the right plugin, click on INSTALL NOW. You will be redirected to the INSTALL PLUGIN and can now see that the plugin has been downloaded, unzipped and installed there.
After that you just have to click on ACTIVATE PLUGIN. If you now go to the WP Maintenance Mode settings, you can specify exactly what your readers should see when you go offline with your blog. To do this, you can simply enter a message that your readers will see when they open your blog. But if you also want to specify when your blog will be back online, you can add a countdown to keep your readers up to date. Be sure that your blog is back online on that date so that your readers get the right information. If you can't estimate the maintenance time, you can simply say, for example, that you will be back online soon.
All installed plugins can be found in the list of installed plugins
If you install the plugin via the directory, you don't need any programming knowledge and it takes a little longer to set the maintenance mode, if you have to install and activate the WP Maintenance Mode plugin first. Once you have saved it in your list under INSTALLED PLUGINS, you can use it at any time to enable and disable Maintenance Mode there.
Install plugins via php
You can also switch on the maintenance mode if you are familiar with some php. To do this, go to the functions.php of your theme if you have access to it. Usually you can use the theme only if you have purchased a paid upgrade to edit the theme. In the functions.php you then only have to enter the following code:
function wpr_maintenance_mode() {
if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_themes' ) || !is_user_logged_in() ) {
wp_die('Maintenance work: We will be back online on 01.02.2017.')
}
}
add_action('get_header', 'wpr_maintenance_mode');
The text in the brackets can of course be formulated by you.
