While preparing your website for launch or making necessary changes for a relaunch, you don’t have to give site visitors a front-row seat for that awkward in-between phase. In this article, we will share a list with an overview of the best free WordPress plugins for maintenance mode or coming soon.
Maintenance Mode Plugins WordPress
Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode
Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode is a user-friendly WordPress maintenance mode plugin that lets you display a background image, logo, header, content, and a MailChimp subscription form. Alternatively, you can create a landing page from scratch with custom HTML.
Dozens of options are split into seven categories: Basic, SEO, themes, design, email, form, and advanced—The support tab links to the plugin support room on WordPress.org. From the settings area, you can customize every aspect of your landing page. Contains two themes within the free version.
Upgrading also unlocks all pro features that are restricted in the free version. This includes IP whitelisting, double opt-in subscription forms, a form name field, and HTTPS enforcement. Additional content is available for your landing page: Video, countdown, progress bar, social icons, and map.
Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode is easy to recommend. It’s free to download, simple to use, and has many great options.
Maintenance
One of the simplest maintenance mode plugins on WordPress.org, Maintenance is active on over 400,000 WordPress websites and lets you customize your landing page through one settings page.
You can upload a background image and a logo and assign your colors. Beyond that, you’ll need to customize the main content area within the WordPress visual editor, which opens up possibilities such as embedding images and videos. The plugin also has a front-end login form and support for Google Analytics. It also allows you to exclude specific posts and pages from being placed in maintenance mode.
WP Maintenance Mode
Active on more than 600,000 websites, WP Maintenance Mode is an interesting WordPress maintenance mode plugin that’s 100% free to use. It gives you full control over who can see your admin area and the front end of your website.
There’s support for Google Analytics, and the main content area is editable using the WordPress visual editor. In addition to changing the background, you can display a countdown timer, a subscription form, social media profiles, and a contact form. WP Maintenance Mode has a built-in bot that asks visitors questions you define. The goal of the bot is to capture visitors’ email addresses. All entered email addresses can download in CSV format.
The plugin is also GDPR compliant. There’s an option to link to a privacy policy page in the footer, and you can add your GDPR information to the contact form, too. WP Maintenance Mode is one of the great free WordPress plugins for future pages and maintenance mode.
From a design point of view, it’s a bit restrictive. Because you have no control over where content like the countdown timer and social media icons are displayed on your landing page, it’s easy to recommend WP Maintenance Mode as it offers so many useful features free of charge.
Under Construction
Developed by the same people behind Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode, Under Construction is a good-looking WordPress maintenance mode plugin with two simple landing page designs. It’s active on more than 300,000 websites.
The main content area can be modified using the WordPress visual editor, and you can also enable a login button, social media icons, and a custom footer. A lot of useful features are available in the settings area. You can set an automatic end time for your maintenance message. Also, whitelist specific WordPress user roles so they always see your full site.
A single license for Under Construction Pro retails at $69. It offers MailChimp integration, an affiliates module, and more than a hundred additional great landing page designs. The agency license costs $250 and provides all pro features, 60 additional landing page designs, advanced drag-and-drop builder modules, and Zapier integration. Both licenses are for a one-off fee, so you don’t have to worry about yearly renewals.
The developers of Under Construction have limited the number of themes available in the free version. I don’t believe this will be a deal-breaker, as the two included designs are good and let you customize your message. Upgrade to Under Construction Pro to unlock all features and landing page designs.
CMP — Coming Soon & Maintenance Plugin
CMP — Coming Soon & Maintenance Plugin is a highly customizable coming soon and maintenance mode plugin for WordPress. Enabling lets you display a landing page for your whole website, your homepage, or only for those who have been blacklisted, one of WordPress users’ best maintenance mode solutions. A redirection mode is also available.
The plugin lets you adjust your logo, content, background, countdown timer, subscription form, social media icons, and footer copyright. Each element has many options. For example, you can apply an image, video, graphical pattern, gradient, and more for your background.
It is possible to customize colors and fonts, too, and there’s an option to add custom CSS. In addition to Google Analytics support, you can also define your SEO settings for your landing page, which is an excellent addition that’s not usually provided. Three themes come packaged with CMP, and 16 are available on the developer’s website. Two are free to download, and the rest are $10 each.
Honorable Mentions
There are dozens of coming soon and maintenance mode plugins on WordPress.org. In addition, a few do not appear from our original list of more than 40 WordPress plugins.
With over 900,000 installations, Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode is the most popular coming soon and maintenance mode WordPress plugin. In contrast, it’s easy to use. It lacks many advanced filtering and design features in other maintenance mode plugins. There are no themes in the free version either, so you need to create everything from scratch.
Conclusion About Maintenance Mode Plugins WordPress
Always back up your website before installing new plugins, especially those that could affect your site’s functionality or appearance. We hope today’s article about a list in which we gave an overview of the best free maintenance mode and coming soon plugins for WordPress under construction has helped you!