Normally, you can work on/with your Wordpress site without having to put it in maintenance mode.

You can customize its appearance, perform various tweaks or structural changes, add/publish new content, change themes, add/remove plugins, etc without any downtime.

However, certain actions can require a lot of time and during this time your site may appear inaccessible/broken to your users ... Now, if your site is relatively new and you don't have a steady traffic flow with lots of visitors, a short downtime won't be a big problem ... On the other hand, if you have returning visitors and a constant traffic volume, then you don’t want your users to see a broken website because it creates a bad user experience and give them a poor impression of your brand.

In such cases, you'll have to put your website in maintenance mode. The maintenance mode will allow you to display a user-friendly notification instead of a broken site, alternative links to visit, etc. Also, you'll be able to provide a time frame for when the maintenance will be done.

All these efforts will help you to create a better user experience and more importantly, a positive brand image among your users.

And it goes without saying: if you are working on a brand new website, you can use the very same concept to put your website in an under construction mode. This way you'll be able to build anticipation among your users and create hype for your upcoming new website.

This is why I've decided to create this short tutorial where I will show you how easy is to put your Wordpress website in maintenance or under-construction mode.

Interested?

Let's do this!