Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode by Colorlib vs Maintenance Redirect

Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode by Colorlib is a free WordPress plugin that lets you display a professional coming soon page, under construction page, or maintenance mode screen to your visitors while you work on your site behind the scenes. Set it up in minutes directly from the WordPress Live Customizer — no coding required. Choose from 15 fully responsive coming soon templates, each pre-designed with modern layouts and fully customizable through the Customizer. Add your own logo, background image, heading text, countdown timer, and social media links. Collect email subscribers with the built-in MailChimp integration so you can build your audience before launch day. Administrators and editors keep browsing and editing the site normally, with a reminder in the admin bar, while everyone else sees only the coming soon or maintenance page. The plugin also blocks the WordPress REST API for visitors to prevent content exposure while your site is under construction. Why Choose This Coming Soon Plugin? 100% free — no premium version, no ads, no feature restrictions 15 responsive templates — professionally designed coming soon, maintenance mode, and under construction page layouts Live Customizer — customize everything in real time without touching code Countdown timer — count down to your launch date, in your site’s timezone, for every visitor MailChimp subscribe form — collect emails and grow your list while in maintenance mode Social media integration — add links to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and email Custom logo and background — upload your brand logo and a custom background image Google Analytics 4 — track visitors to your coming soon page with GA4 Custom CSS — add your own styles for advanced customization REST API protection — blocks public API access while the site is under construction Developer friendly — filters such as ccsm_skip_redirect, ccsm_force_redirect, ccsm_bypass_capability and ccsm_google_fonts control who sees the page and what it loads Works with all WordPress themes — self-contained templates run independently of your active theme Privacy conscious — no tracking of its own. Note that enabling the optional Google Analytics field, and the Google Fonts each template loads, involve requests to Google, which you may need to disclose depending on your jurisdiction. Developers can turn the fonts off with the ccsm_google_fonts filter How It Works Install and activate the plugin Go to Coming Soon (in the WordPress admin menu) Pick a template and customize the content, colors, images, and countdown timer Enable coming soon mode — visitors see your launch page, you keep working Links Documentation and Support GitHub Repository This plugin is developed and maintained by Colorlib. If you enjoy using it, please leave a review — it helps other WordPress users discover the plugin.

This plugin is intended primarily for designers / 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 – see FAQs. 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 2 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. See FAQ below about working through a proxy. 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. They can be presented with a custom HMTL page. They can be redirected to a static HTML page. This static page will need to be uploaded to the server via FTP or some other method. This plugin DOES NOT include any way to upload the static page file. Any URL can be used here, and it doesn’t need to be on the same server (so you could redirect back to the client’s current site if you’re working on a dev site, for example). However, it should NOT be the URL of a WordPress page or post on the same site as this will result in an infinite redirect loop.