Upgrading Wordpress: Notify Visitors with Maintenance Mode

When you upgrade WordPress, your blog is offline for the period of time you upgrade and your visitors see all sorts of php and mysql database errors displayed. A better and more professional way is to notify your visitors of an ongoing WordPress upgrade and that your blog will be back in under an hour, so they can check back. The Maintenance Mode wordpress plugin does just that…

This Maintenance Mode wordpress plugin adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Check the options page screenshot. The following default message is being displayed to your site visitors (which you can modify) -

Maintenance Mode
SITE is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance.
Please try back in 60 minutes.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

This is the way professional web sites operate. Till now here is what I used to do – Since I host wordpress in a subdirectory “archives”, the advantage is I can easily upload a index.html page at the root of my domain (this supersedes your index.php and replaces your domains front page) and showcases whatever html page message I need to convey easily (more WordPress upgrade tips). When all is done, I simply delete or rename index.html and index.php is back as default index page.

Now the? Maintenance Mode plugin makes this task easy and is a more professional way to announce scheduled maintainence.