Maintenance Splash Page [WordPress]

Though WordPress is the best for Blogging, it lacks few features by default. For instance, Joomla helps you show a Maintenance page with just few clicks, but WordPress doesn’t. Similarly, you can’t set ‘unpublished’ status to categories in WordPress if you temporarily want hide a category. Luckily WordPress’ repository has got over thousands of plugins that can tweak your blog to give it more of a professional CMS look.

Here, we’ll be using a plugin by name ‘Maintenance Mode’ which when activated from the backend, will show your visitors a custom splash-page, also letting them know when the site would be back from maintenance.

Alright, lets start. Download the plugin from WordPress repository, upload it to your server and activate it from the Plugins page.

Once you’ve activated, you’ll be able to find it as a link ‘Maintenance Mode’ in Settings. Configuration is simple, in five steps

  1. Select the status – Activated/Deactivated
  2. Custom Message
  3. Back time (if specified in custom message)
  4. Paths to exclude (optional)
  5. Permissions (optional)

Start with Title in the message box, this serves as the page title on your maintenance splash page. Next, enter your custom message. You can use HTML codes here. You’ll next have to specify the back time.

To further tweak, you can exclude few paths. Say, you want to exclude your contact page available at domain.com/contact/, type in /contact/ and the page will still be accessible. Finally, if your blog has multiple authors with Contributor, editor, author privileges, you can prevent them from accessing the backend when you site is under maintenance. This prevents users with privileges lower than Administrator from accessing the dashboard. When you are done, select ‘Activate’ and save your settings. You should now see your maintenance page in action. ;)

Do check out the official plugin page. Also, read on how to eliminate comment spammers, a plugin from the same creator.

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