Website owners and managers need to learn how to put WordPress into maintenance mode before doing any significant updates.
That’s because putting it into maintenance mode is the perfect way to ensure that your visitors don’t experience any disruption as you make your changes.
When in maintenance mode, your website can show a message to your visitors informing them that your site is undergoing maintenance and is temporarily unavailable. This helps to keep your website’s integrity intact, as visitors won’t be able to access the site while you’re making changes.
Additionally, maintenance mode helps to protect your site from potential malicious attacks while you’re working on it. This is particularly important if you’re making changes to sensitive areas of the site, such as the database or core files.
Enabling WordPress maintenance mode also helps to protect your visitors’ data, as any changes you make won’t be exposed to the public while your site is in maintenance mode.
Further, maintenance mode helps you to avoid any data loss. For example, suppose you’re making changes to a live site. You could potentially cause issues or data loss if you don’t take the proper precautions.
By putting your site into maintenance mode, you can make sure that any changes you’re making are saved and won’t be accidentally overwritten by other visitors.
So now that you know the benefits of putting your WordPress site in maintenance mode, let’s discuss some of the methods on how to put your WordPress site in maintenance mode.
How To Put WordPress Into Maintenance Mode – 4 Methods
Here are four methods that you can do to put your WordPress site in maintenance mode.
Maintenance Function In WordPress
Your first option in learning how to enable maintenance mode in WordPress is using the built-in “Maintenance Function”. The maintenance function in WordPress is a built-in feature that allows you to turn your website into maintenance mode and display a user-friendly message to visitors.
You can find it in the “Settings” section of your WordPress dashboard under “Maintenance Function”.
Once you have successfully activated it in WordPress, you can customize the message that will be displayed to your visitors.
You can also choose the duration of the maintenance mode, which allows you to set the time when your website will be back online.
And you can also decide whether or not to display the maintenance mode message to logged-in users.
Adding Custom Code To Display A Maintenance Page
Adding custom code to display a maintenance page is a method that requires you to add a few lines of code. This will let visitors see a static page you created instead of the default WordPress maintenance page.
To add the custom code, you can access the wp-config.php file through an FTP client. Then add the code below to the bottom of the file.
define(‘WP_MAINTENANCE_MODE’, true);
if (WP_MAINTENANCE_MODE) {
require(ABSPATH . ‘wp-content/maintenance.php’);
}
This code will redirect visitors to the maintenance.php file, which you can create in the wp-content folder.
Inside the maintenance.php file, you can create the content for the maintenance page. You can include a message about why the site is down and when it will be back up.
After adding the custom code and creating the maintenance.php file, you can save and upload the changes to your site. Then, visitors will be redirected to the maintenance page you created.
Enabling Maintenance Mode Through .htaccess
Enabling maintenance mode through .htaccess is another way to put your site in maintenance mode, but it’s more complicated and requires more coding knowledge.
To enable maintenance mode through .htaccess, you need to add a few lines of code to the top of your .htaccess file. This code will redirect visitors to a maintenance page or to a different website.
After you have added the code, save your .htaccess file and upload it to your WordPress site. The maintenance mode will then be enabled.
Once your maintenance mode is enabled, you can customize the maintenance page and add a message explaining why your site is currently unavailable. Consider including a date and time when the site will be available again.
And once you’ve finished customizing the maintenance page, you can disable maintenance mode by simply deleting the code from the .htaccess file.
Using WordPress Maintenance Mode Plugins
Using a WordPress maintenance mode plugin is the easiest solution for those who don’t want to mess around with code. They allow you to quickly and easily enable maintenance mode and customize the page that your visitors will see.
Generally, once you’ve chosen the plugin you want to use and installed and activated it, you can customize the page that people will see while your site is in maintenance mode.
You can add a heading, message, contact form, social media links, and more. You can also set a timer so that your site will automatically come out of maintenance mode after a certain amount of time.
Some plugins also allow you to set a password so that only certain people can view your website while in maintenance mode.
We hope you found this “How To Put WordPress Into Maintenance Mode” blog post valuable. Enabling WordPress maintenance mode is easy if you know what you’re doing.
Do you need assistance enabling WordPress maintenance mode on your website? Whether adding custom code or choosing the best WordPress maintenance mode plugins that suit your specific needs, the myWPguys team will be more than happy to help. So sign up here today, and we look forward to assisting you soon.