Managing a WordPress website requires the admin to regularly update the website with new content, declutter it at times, and run regular maintenance scans and audits. All these tasks take the site off the Internet for a while where the users can’t access it due to unavailability. However, turning them away with a blank page or a page that displays error can hurt the reputation of a website and even drive away the visitors altogether. This is where the ‘Coming Soon’ or the ‘Maintenance Mode’ pages of a website come to play.
There are more than twice a dozen of Coming Soon and Maintenance mode plugins available in the official WordPress plugin repository. One of our recent favorites from the best ones is the “Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode Pages” plugin for WordPress. This extremely easy to use plugin is meant for new and experienced WordPress users alike and is available as a free as well as a premium plugin.
Developed and maintained by the WebFactory, this Coming Soon and Maintenance mode plugin is known as the Minimal Coming Soon and Maintenance mode plugin for its free version. Whereas, the premium version is called the Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode PRO for WordPress. In this blog post, we have reviewed the plugin and the performance offered by both the versions so that you can make an informed choice and better deal with the Maintenance mode of your website.
Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode: Free Version
Available over the WordPress repository, the free version of the plugin helps its users quickly & easily set up a Coming Soon, Maintenance Mode, Landing Page or Launch Page for their website, as and when the need arises. The plugin is a drag-and-drop and fully GDPR compliant and can function well with all the other WordPress themes and plugins.
If you want to create a vibrant ‘Coming Soon’, ‘Maintenance Mode’, ‘Landing Page’ or ‘Launch Page’ for your website, you can do so and completely customize the look and feel including background color, cover image, fonts, logo etc. You can easily add Custom CSS and HTML and stretch the Background Image to Cover the Entire Browser.
If you want to receive emails from visitors while your website remains unavailable, the plugin offers a seamless integration with the MailChimp API. Before you activate the page and make it live for the visitors to see, you can easily preview it. One of the best features of the plugin is that you can choose to display the normal website to the search engines and the Coming Soon page for the visitors.
The plugin supports other plugins such as the W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Endurance Page Cache, SiteGround SuperCacher, WP Fastest Cache and Swift Performance Cache support.
Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode Pro Version
The features offered in the Pro version are plenty and quite useful. The Pro version offers 50+ themes that are ready-to-use themes for any business or website. The plugin also features 26+ Instagram filters and 47+ content animations which will help you provide a completely different look to your website elements.
The PRO plugin also features 400,000 premium images, powered by Unsplash for accessing free hi-res images directly from the plugin’s media library. Helping you power your site’s SEO endeavours, the plugin also helps you craft your content in order to rank your site as best as possible with its SEO preview and analysis tools.
If you are looking to have a super-creative Coming soon page for your website, you can choose to have a video from any video platform as well. Autoplaying these videos and putting them on mute for the autoplay can be your choice. Adding a zoomable and Responsive map, a Subscribe Form and Social Icons to your site pages is also super easy through this plugin.
The highlight of this plugin is probably its Countdown module that will help you display a timer for your viewers to help them know the time left for the site to go live. A Progress Bar can also be added. Any custom changes that you would like on your website can be added with the help of plugin’s custom HTML module that will override all the other plugin module settings.
PRICING:
The pricing plans have been laid well in the image above. If you have paid for one of their plans and are not satisfied with the purchase, you are fully protected by their 100% Risk-Free Guarantee and within the next 7 days you can expect a 100% refund.
Conclusion:
In our honest opinion, the Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode Pages for WordPress Plugin is quite a package for the number of features it offers. A must try, this plugin will definitely help you craft an amazing Coming soon/Maintenance page up in less than five minutes and that too, without any complex steps.