Maintenance Mode
Show visitors only an "under maintenance" page while you work. Search engines get a 503, so rankings stay. Includes scheduling, IP allowlist and a link for stakeholders
Show visitors only a maintenance page while you work
"Sorabun > Backup / Migration > Maintenance Mode" temporarily closes the site. It is for Pro and administrators only, and does the same job as WP Maintenance Mode or SeedProd.
- Switching themes or redesigning
- Large server or plugin updates, before and after a migration
- Keeping an unlaunched site on "Coming soon"
People who can write posts (Contributor and above) stay logged in and see the site as usual while they work. Only visitors see the maintenance page.
How to use it
- Check "Turn on" for Maintenance Mode
- If needed, enter start and end times, a heading and a message
- Save. "What visitors see" at the bottom of the screen shows how it looks
While it is on, a red "Under maintenance" item appears in the admin bar. When you are done, uncheck it and save (if you set an end time, it turns off automatically).
Two modes
| Mode | Response | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance | 503 (temporarily unavailable) with Retry-After | A live site. Search engines read it as "come back later", and rankings and listings stay |
| Coming soon | 200 with noindex | An unlaunched site. Kept out of search results |
Do not use "Coming soon" on a live site for long. It tells search engines not to list the site, so your articles drop out of search results.
Even in maintenance mode, a 503 that lasts for days starts to look like a closed site to search engines. Keep it to a day or two at most.
Scheduling
- Start: the site closes at this time. Leave empty to close right away
- End: it turns off automatically at this time. The maintenance page shows it as the expected return, and search engines are told to come back around then (Retry-After, up to 1 day). Leave empty to keep it on until you turn it off
Page caches are cleared at the start and at the end.
Letting people in without logging in
- Allowed IPs: visitors from these IPs (an office network, for example) can see the site without logging in. Ranges like
203.0.113.0/24work too. The screen shows "your current IP" - Link for people who are not logged in: give this link to clients or stakeholders and they can see the site during maintenance (for one week in that browser). If it spreads, "Recreate the link" makes the old link stop working
What keeps running
The admin screens, login, REST API, WP-Cron, robots.txt and the XML sitemap keep working as usual. Closing these would make it impossible to turn maintenance off, or would stop scheduled posts and background tasks.
Page caches
When you turn it on or off, Sorabun clears the page caches it knows about (WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, SiteGround, Autoptimize). The maintenance page itself is never cached. If a CDN such as Cloudflare caches pages, clear the CDN cache too.