Maintenance mode

Maintenance mode puts a simple “We’ll be back soon” page in front of your website. Visitors see that page, while you and anyone else signed in to WordPress keep using the site and its dashboard as normal.

Use it for short jobs where visitors shouldn’t see a half-finished page: a redesign going live, a big content import, or fixing something that broke.

Turn on maintenance mode

1. Open the website, then More at the top right.
2. Choose Maintenance mode.
3. Confirm Turn on maintenance mode.

What visitors see

Visitors get a page saying “We’ll be back soon” and that your domain is being updated right now.

The page is sent with a “temporarily unavailable” status and a request to check back later, so search engines treat it as a short break and don’t drop your pages.

Who still gets through

• Anyone signed in to WordPress sees the real website.
• The WordPress login page and the dashboard (wp-admin) keep working, so you can sign in. WP Admin one-click sign-in works too.
• WordPress’s scheduled tasks keep running.

To check what visitors see, open the website in a private browser window where you aren’t signed in.

Turn it off

1. Open More.
2. Choose Turn off maintenance mode.
3. Confirm Turn off.

The website answers visitors normally again straight away.

Good to know

• While the website is being moved to another server, the switch is unavailable until the move is finished or cancelled.
• To stop the website answering at all, use Disable website instead. See Delete a website.

Tip

For longer work, build the changes on a staging copy and push them live when they’re ready. The live website then needs maintenance mode for a few minutes at most, or not at all.