Putting Your WordPress Site into Maintenance Mode Print

What this is, and what it isn't

Sometimes you want to work on your site while visitors see a tidy "we'll be back soon" message instead of a half-finished page or a broken layout. That is deliberate maintenance mode, and it is a normal, useful thing to do during a redesign or a big update.

It is worth separating from a similar-sounding problem straight away. If your site is stuck showing a maintenance message you did not put there, usually after an update that did not finish, that is a different situation with a different fix, covered in our article on the stuck maintenance message. This article is about switching maintenance mode on and off on purpose.

When it's worth using

Maintenance mode is for visible work in progress, not for quick edits:

• A redesign where the site will look broken or half-done while you work.
• A big batch of changes you would rather visitors not watch happening.
• Major updates or restructuring where pages may briefly misbehave.

For a small edit, changing some text, swapping an image, maintenance mode is overkill. Most small changes are fine to make on the live site directly, and for anything genuinely risky, a staging site, covered in our article on staging, is often the better tool because it lets the public keep using the live site normally while you work on a private copy.

How to switch it on

WordPress does not have a polished maintenance mode built in for this purpose, so it is handled with a plugin. A good maintenance-mode plugin lets you:

• Show a custom holding page, with your own message, branding, and often an expected return time, far nicer than a blank or broken page.
• Let yourself keep working while the public sees the holding page, usually by staying logged in as an administrator, so you see the real site while visitors see the message.
• Switch it off cleanly when you are done.

Install a reputable maintenance-mode plugin, configure your holding page, and switch it on when you start work. As with any plugin, keep it updated, and our WordPress update service handles that if we manage your site.

The thing people forget: switch it off

The single most common maintenance-mode mistake is leaving it on. You finish your work, move on, and days later realise your site has been showing "we'll be back soon" to every visitor and customer the whole time. So build the habit: the last step of any maintenance session is switching maintenance mode off, and then checking the live site in a private or incognito window, where you are not logged in as an administrator, to confirm the public genuinely sees the real site and not a leftover holding page. Checking while logged in is exactly how you miss it, because you see the real site while everyone else still sees the message.

Good to know

For most significant work, staging is the more powerful approach, because it means no maintenance mode at all: the public keeps using your live site while you build changes on a private copy, then push them across when ready, as our staging article explains. Maintenance mode is the simpler tool for when you are working directly on the live site and just need to hide the mess while you do. Whichever you use, the same discipline applies, a backup before you start, so that whatever happens during the work, you can always get back to where you began. And if a big change feels like more than you want to risk yourself, ask us to handle it.