Maintenance mode
Elementor offers you a way to easily set maintenance mode pages on WordPress. (Read the complete Maintenance Mode post here)
This option can be very handy in several situations:
- Changing a site's design
- Fixing a bug
- Launching a new site
In these situations and many others, you are likely to want to see the website yourself, but show your visitors a maintenance mode page.
With Elementor's maintenance mode, you can display a custom maintenance mode page to visitors, and send the right HTTP response to search engines.
How to go into maintenance mode in Elementor
Here how you go into maintenance mode:
Step 1 - Save a template you wish to use for your maintenance mode page. You can also use one of our predesigned templates.
Step 2 - Go to Elementor > Tools
Step 3 - Choose between coming soon and maintenance mode.
Step 4 - Pick the template for the maintenance mode.
That's it, you are in maintenance mode! You will see a red button on your top WordPress bar with the text: "Maintenance Mode ON".
Now your visitors will see the maintenance mode page, and you'll be able to see the website you are working on.
Maintenance mode to search engines
Basically, every time you visit a website, before the website itself loads, your browser requests that the page returns a response regarding its status. It makes sense because the browser wants to know if the page is there, ready to load.
You probably recognize the 404 response, saying the page isn't there. There are other responses, like a 200 response, an OK response, saying everything is right with the page. Another response is 503, or Service Unavailable, the response that the site is down temporarily for maintenance.
In Elementor, Maintenance Mode returns HTTP503, so search engines know to come back a short time later to check again if the site is online. If your site is under construction, make sure you don't keep it down too long, because eventually, search engines will see it as no longer a temporary situation.
Coming Soon, on the other hand, returns HTTP200, meaning the site is ready to be indexed.
Setting access roles
You can set the specific roles that will have access to the site in development. In the future, pro users will also be able to include a login form, to make sure just the right people get into the site while maintenance mode is on.