Maintenance Redirect

Description

This plugin is intended primarily for designers and developers that need to allow clients to preview sites before being available to the general public or to temporarily hide your WordPress site while undergoing major updates.

Any logged in user with WordPress administrator privileges will be allowed to view the site regardless of the settings in the plugin. The exact privilege can be set using a filter hook.

The behaviour of this plugin can be enabled or disabled at any time without losing any of the settings configured in its settings pane. However, deactivating the plugin is recommended versus having it activated while disabled.

When redirect is enabled it can send two different header types. “200 OK” is best used for when the site is under development and “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” is best for when the site is temporarily taken offline for small amendments. If used for a long period of time, 503 can damage your Google ranking.

A list of IP addresses can be set up to completely bypass maintenance mode. This option is useful when needing to allow a client’s entire office to access the site while in maintenance mode without needing to maintain individual access keys.

Access keys work by creating a cookie on the user’s computer that will be checked for when maintenance mode is active. When a new key is created, a link to create the access key cookie will be emailed to the email address provided. Access can then be revoked either by disabling or deleting the key.

This plugin allows three methods of notifying users that a site is undergoing maintenance: they can be presented with a simple message, a custom HTML page, or redirected to a static HTML page.