How to Put Your Website on Maintenance Mode with Slim Maintenance Plugin
Need to quickly hide your WordPress site while you make changes? Use the Slim Maintenance Mode plugin. It temporarily hides your website from normal visitors while still letting logged-in administrators see and work on the site. Visitors see a basic maintenance message instead. It also sends a 503 Service Unavailable status code, which tells search engines the site is only down temporarily.How to turn it on
If you’re a client of mine
You’ll likely already have it installed, so you just need to:
- Log in to WordPress.
- Go to Plugins.
- Find Slim Maintenance Mode.
- Click Activate.
That’s it. Your site is now in maintenance mode. You can check it by going to your website on your phone, where you should see the maintenance message.
If you are logged in as an administrator, you will still see the normal website in your current browser, such as Chrome. You should also see a black bar at the top of the screen, which is a quick menu to the Dashboard.
If you do not have it installed
Then first:
- Log in to WordPress.
- Go to Plugins > Add New.
- Search for Slim Maintenance Mode.
- Install the plugin.
- Click Activate.
That’s it. Your site is now in maintenance mode. You can check it by going to your website on your phone, where you should see the maintenance message.
If you are logged in as an administrator, you will still see the normal website in your current browser, such as Chrome. You should also see a black bar at the top of the screen, which is a quick menu to the Dashboard.
How to turn it off
When you are done working:
- Go to Plugins.
- Find Slim Maintenance Mode.
- Click Deactivate.
Your website will be live again.
When to use it
Use maintenance mode when you are:
- Updating pages
- Changing the design
- Fixing broken layouts
- Testing important plugin or theme changes
- Preparing a site before launch