editant Maintenance

editant Maintenance puts your site behind a clean holding page while you work on it, without locking yourself out and without hurting your search ranking. It is a free tool, published on WordPress.org, and it needs nothing from your active theme.

What it does

When you enable maintenance mode, every front-end visitor sees a self-contained holding page. You and any roles you choose keep seeing the real site, so you can make and check changes while everyone else waits. Administrators always bypass, so you can never lock yourself out.

The page is styled with the editant brand out of the box. You set the heading, the message, the text colours, and a full-screen background image; you can replace the header with your own logo and name, or hide it entirely; and you can show a contact email as a mailto link.

Behind the scenes, front-end requests return an HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable) with a Retry-After header. That is the correct signal to send search engines during planned downtime, and the holding page is marked noindex so it does not end up cached in results. When you switch maintenance mode off, your normal pages return as usual.

What’s included

• One-click enable and disable from Settings, Maintenance Mode.
• Configurable title and subtitle, with colour pickers for each.
• Optional full-screen background image from the media library, with a navy overlay for readability.
• A header you control: the editant logo and name by default, your own logo and/or name, or no header at all.
• Per-role bypass, so nominated roles see the live site; administrators always bypass.
• Optional contact email, shown as a mailto link and obfuscated against scrapers.
• Correct 503 with Retry-After, and a noindex holding page.
• Automatic cache clearing for common caching plugins each time you toggle maintenance mode.
• Bundled IBM Plex fonts served from your own site, so the page looks the same on any theme.
• Translation-ready.

Installing it

1. Go to Plugins, Add New in your WordPress admin and search for “editant Maintenance”, or download it from the WordPress.org listing linked below.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Go to Settings, Maintenance Mode.
4. Set your title, message, colours, and, if you want, a background image and contact email.
5. Choose which roles bypass maintenance mode.
6. Tick “Enable maintenance mode” and save.

Requirements: WordPress 6.0 or later, PHP 7.4 or later.

Which visitors see the page

Everyone who is not logged in, plus any logged-in user whose roles are not on the bypass list. Administrators always bypass. AJAX, REST API, and cron requests are allowed through, so scheduled jobs and integrations keep working.

If visitors still see the normal site

This is almost always page caching. If a page was cached before you enabled maintenance mode, that cached copy keeps being served and WordPress never runs for those requests, so the holding page is never generated.

To confirm caching is the cause, visit your site with a unique query string, for example https://yoursite.com/?x=12345. If that shows the maintenance page while the normal address does not, a cache is serving the old copy.

There are two kinds of cache to think about:

• Caching plugins (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed, WP Fastest Cache, SiteGround Optimizer, Cache Enabler, Nginx Helper, Autoptimize). editant Maintenance clears these automatically each time you toggle maintenance mode, so they normally need no action.
• Host, server, and CDN caches (a server-level Varnish or Nginx cache, or a CDN such as Cloudflare). These sit in front of WordPress and cannot be cleared by any plugin. Clear it once from your hosting control panel or CDN dashboard after enabling maintenance mode, or wait for the cache to expire.

To see which cache your host uses, open your browser’s developer tools, look at the Network tab, and inspect the response headers for the main page. Headers such as Via, X-Varnish, X-Cache, Age, X-LiteSpeed-Cache, or CF-Cache-Status tell you a host, server, or CDN cache is active and will need a manual purge.

Privacy

editant Maintenance stores its settings in your own WordPress database and sends no data to any external service. The bundled fonts are served from your own site, not from a third-party font CDN. It creates no custom tables and no capabilities; uninstalling removes its single settings row.

Multisite

It works on multisite. Each site keeps its own settings, and uninstalling removes the plugin’s settings from every site in the network.

Where to get it

editant Maintenance is one of our free tools. You can find it alongside the others on the Free Tools page, and download or install it directly from the WordPress.org plugin listing.