Web Dorian
WordPress sites or blogs need regular maintenance and updates. Changes can be associated with WP plugins, themes, upgrades, broken links, invalid pages, etc. You may also need to introduce new features or PHP functions that need testing and tweaking. When you perform maintenance or changes, it is sensible to have your site placed under construction mode.
Nonetheless, staging can be used, while updating your site, but there are genuine reasons for placing in maintenance mode. Maintenance mode is crucial, especially when there is a security bug. If you make cosmetic changes while your site is active, it can throw away users. They might even think that your site is hacked, which is bad for the reputation of your brand. No one wants to do business with a site that has security issues.
It is better to take your website offline, and enable maintenance mode, while you resolve the issues. Customers are turned away for some hours, but your reputation remains protected. After the issue gets fixed, you can reactivate your site!
Beginners can install a plugin for Coming Soon Page and make a preferred modifications to build a temporary page in seconds. Below is the review of the best 3 WP under construction page plugins, It will help you make an informed decision.
UnderConstuctionPage [Rating – 4.8/5.0]
UCP is a simple plugin, which offers all the necessary features for creating maintenance mode. The current active installation is 380,000 and as days pass its users are growing in numbers. The popularity is because UCP plugin installation and configuration is easy. The layout templates are designed beautifully, which you can customize as per your needs.
Drag & drop allows creating pages faster. Royalty-free and ready to use images are available in 4K and HD resolutions. You can control the whole website, or even a single page.
Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode [Rating – 4.4/5.0]
Another effective coming soon plugin is publicly available for sale on WordPress.org and CodeCanyon. The premium version offers several added features but is total value for you money [$18]. Its interesting features are –
- More than 100 social media icons
- Opt-in form [AJAX] that incorporates the current email marketing services
- Full-size background slideshow driven by jQuery
- A countdown timer
- Define user roles [exclude particular users from viewing the maintenance page]
Nonetheless, users can customize text and colors of the maintenance mode page making it more personalized.
Maintenance – [Rating – 4.3/5.0]
Maintenance plugin is available in free & pro version modes. There are 400,000+ active users and daily there are 2,000+ downloads reported. It is designed to create and customize a WordPress website maintenance page. After updating, your visitors get a view of this creative page rather than the original site. It enables the 503 status code that hints service temporarily unavailable. You can also use other WordPress redirects as per your SEO needs.
You can add a preferred background image, logos, choose color options, add text, and select the best fonts, to create a customized page that looks appealing on every device. It is a free plugin that can create a wonderful coming soon page!