Very often, when developing a website on WordPress, it is necessary to close it to third parties and search engines, so as not to turn on the research test data in advance and deny access to technical pages. There are different options to solve this problem:
- Close the site at the web server level
- Perform the development locally (but then you will not be able to show intermediate results to the client)
- Use a plugin to block access to the site
Let’s analyze the third option as the easiest and fastest to use. Now there are a large number of such plugins and each one solves this problem in its own way: someone adds countdowns before the rough launch of the site, others allow you to change the look of the end page like you like, and still others add a subscription form for those who expect to receive an email after the site launches, but I prefer to create a simple page with no unnecessary settings – just a registration and that’s it . 🙂
All plugins are easily searched in the WordPress admin panel in the plugins section by the phrase “Maintenance mode” without any problem. Choose the one you prefer, but always make sure that the plugin version is compatible with your WordPress version and that it is updated no later than one month ago.
Of all these plugins, I like Maintenance Modeas the easiest to use. In addition, it has a very high rating among all plugins, it has been installed by over 20 thousand users, the plugin is regularly updated and is compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
The plugin has only one downside that some users may not like – it gives a response status of 200 instead of 5xx or 403, for example. If you are worried about this, I recommend that you look at similar plugins to solve this task from the list above. Here is the response code for the Maintenance Mode plugin:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 09:04:47 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3
Install as usual and activate it. After installation, the plug-in will be available in the “Parameters” – “Maintenance mode” menu. Let’s see what he offers us to customize the technical page.
The first option activates the service mode, check:
And then all that remains is to write the text that will be displayed to the visitor. You can insert all the elements that are available to you in the WordPress editor: images, text, any design, video links, registration form. There are no restrictions here, everything is at your discretion.
And after that your site will look like this for an unauthorized user in the admin panel:
Simple and practical, no frills! 🙂