Is Your Website Under Maintenance?

If you are running a website that brings in cash and it so happens that there’s some bug or error that occurs that you have to fix it. Most of the times, it’s best for your visitors to see a message saying that the website is under maintenance rather than experience the bug or issue.

Another scenario where this is important is when you are developing and testing the website prior to going live. A lot of developers develop online with WordPress rather than develop the project locally and then upload the files once it goes live. For these developers that do develop online, having an “Under Construction” page is the way to go.

JF3 Maintenance Redirect is one such WordPress plugin that enables you to do just that — put a message online for the general public while allowing the developer or administrator to test the website.

After installing and activating the plugin, you should see an item in the Setting menu called JF3 Maint Redirect. Upon selecting this, it shows the JF3 Maintenance Redirect page.

At the top of the Maintenance Redirect page, you should see Enable Maintenance Mode. At the bottom are the different options.

• No – Do not use maintenance mode
• Yes – Use maintenance mode

Select the last one. Note: when not using the plugin, it’s best to de-activate it rather than choosing the first option in this section.

On this page you should be able to see three panels:

• Unrestricted IPs
• Access Keys
• Maintenance Message

Filling up the fields in Unrestricted IPs and Maintenance Message will allow you to display a Maintenance and/or Under Construction page.

Unrestricted IPs

The name field would be the name of your website while the IP field would be the IP Address. To get the IP address of your website, you can use a number of tools online by searching for get ip address of website. Once you have the IP address, type it in the IP field and click on the Add New IP link.

Maintenance Message

On this panel, just type the message that your visitors should see to explain why the website cannot be accessed and when it can be accessed. Above the message box is a combo box with the default value as: Message only – the easy way. Just leave this as is. Then click on Update Settings. Log out of WordPress.

So now, when you type the name of your website on the browser, you should see a page with the message that you typed in.

When testing, just login to your Dashboard, and when you want to see the interface of your website, just righ-click on the name of your website found on the upper left hand of your Dashboard, and click Open In New Tab. This should give you the full website minus the page containing the Maintenance message.

Related Posts:

• Site Maintenance