Owning a website is something like owning a hotel. You need to take good care of it by providing new content and maintaining its features and plugins in order to make it run smoothly. Sometime in the future, you will be faced with the need to shut down the site in order to do maintenance on it.
It is critical that you don’t neglect your site by giving it little to no content and providing outdated content. Maybe you want to repost some of your old posts or blogs, or perhaps you want to change up the entire structure of the site.
Whatever it is that you want to upgrade on your site, it will take you some time to finish and polish it all up. And that’s why you need to greet the visitors with an explanation of why the site is not working! By simply installing a plugin that allows you to create a “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” or “The Site Is Under Maintenance”, you assure your visitors that you are still there and that you did not go out of business.
And as we all know, lies and speculations make it around the world in no time while the truth is still tying its shoelaces. That’s why it’s important for you to set up such pages so that people don’t think and talk the worst about your site.
Then again, you maybe don’t even have the site published for the world to see yet, but you do know when the site will be published. If this is the case, then you can create a simple “Coming Soon” page with a timer telling people when the site will go live. For this, too, you can simply download a plugin that will do all of the work for you (you have to design it of course).
I will now provide you with a couple of simple and powerful plugins that have many features that you will find to be very useful when creating such pages. So, let’s see:
Coming Soon Plugins
Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode WP Plugin
Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode is a powerful WordPress plugin that provides you with the necessary tools and features which will allow you to create exactly what the name implies.
If you are in a hurry and need the maintenance or coming soon page to be done in a single day (it takes a couple of minutes to set it up) then this plugin is for you. Not only does it allow you to create these pages, but it also has a powerful editing tool that allows you to make these pages look very professional and slick.
It has over 120 themes available in the pro version along with 26+ Instagram filters and 47+ content animations that will help you out in creating the perfect coming soon & under maintenance pages. And don’t get me started about the number of free images that you get to choose from (yes, there are over 1 million free images available for you to choose from).
It comes with the ability to show you the SEO of the page that you are creating, and it will provide you with what the SEO score will be. Plus, it will analyze what you created and give you advice on how to further improve the pages, so you can get the maximum out of them in regard to SEO.
It also has support for your autoresponder which you will want to set up if your visitors have any questions or inquiries.
As far as the reviews go, they are overwhelmingly positive with 9 out of 10 people recommending this plugin. The people working on the plugin update it frequently and fix bugs that may arise in no time, which is a big plus for me.
So, if you are a big site or business, then this is the way to go, especially if you have multiple sites that you have to maintain and update frequently. The other thing I would like to mention is how incredibly lite the plugin actually is considering all of the tools and features that it has built into it.
Coming Soon Pro
If you want to create a fast and simple coming soon page for your website then the “Coming Soon Pro” plugin is the right choice for you. It is the most popular WordPress Coming Soon plugin in the market that allows you to create coming soon and maintenance mode pages for your website easily.
Coming Soon Pro has 8 unique and fully responsive design templates with HTML5 and CSS3 compatible animations. In addition, it provides 500+ Google fonts. By using these fonts, you can easily make your Coming Soon Page fonts look clean and stylish.
Coming Soon Pro comes with 7+ newsletters and unlimited customization. With the help of this plugin, you can easily manage your subscriber and also you can see your subscriber in table format.
Under Construction WordPress Plugin
Here we have another well-made lite plugin that will surely take your breath away. It is also capable of creating brilliant and good-looking under maintenance pages with its vast gallery of themes and free images for you to choose from (over 120 themes and over 1 million free images). Because it has so many pictures and themes, every under-maintenance page will look different and unique.
It also has a great social media widget at the bottom (you can put it wherever you want) that allows you to link to your social media sites in no time which is a big plus for the developer.
The biggest benefit of this plugin is its ability to do all of this in record time (I myself couldn’t believe it). Even other people who have left reviews on the plugin praise it for its simplicity and performance (go and check them out yourselves).
The reason why it is so fast to set up a good-looking page is the plugin’s beginner-friendly drag and drop builder. There are also a couple of SEO options for you to choose from that will prevent search engines like Google from penalizing your site while it is under maintenance.
The other beneficial thing about it is that it is also capable of creating other pages as well. Things like landing pages, sales pages, coming soon pages, maintenance pages, and under construction pages. So, if you are in need of such pages as well, then this plugin will provide you with the necessary tools to create such pages on the fly.
Maintenance WordPress Plugin
Maintenance is a simple plugin that allows you to create a fast and simple under maintenance page. It does not contain all of the extensive tools and features as the other plugins, but it does exactly what it says.
If you are a small and simple site that does not require a tool that has a ton of tools, then this is for you. Then again if you are a big business with multiple big sites (or one big site for that matter) then you should better opt for the first two plugins. If you are a small site, then the features and tools that are provided to you by this plugin are more than enough.
You can customize the title, text, and also headline however you want it to look. You can upload and use your own logo, add and blur out the Fullscreen background of the page. And as a cherry on top, it supports Google analytics so that you can still see who is visiting your site.
WP Maintenance Plugin
WP Maintenance is yet another simple and lite plugin that will get the job done in no time. You can edit the text, the color of the text, add your logo, change up the background or add a pattern. All of these things make it a fast and simple plugin for this job with no fuss.
It also comes with Google analytics and it has social media capabilities. Additionally, you can add a countdown on when the site will be put back online.
If you want other people to go and see the site on how it actually looks like while you are changing it up, then you can choose to give access to people who have certain permissions on the site (like admins and editors). Also, you can give access to people with certain IP addresses and ID pages.
All of this makes it a great and fast go-to plugin for when you want to make such a page on the fly. The only downside to this plugin is that it supports only 2 languages (English and French) while all the other ones support 19 languages.
Conclusion
Creating an “Under Maintenance” or “Coming Soon” page can prove to be a challenge especially if you need it done right now at this very moment. That is why you should rather opt to download a plugin that will simplify the process by giving you the tools and features needed to create such pages in no time at all. Whichever plugin you choose from the above ones, I’m sure it will be your faithful companion in the years of site development to come.
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