It doesn’t matter if you’re building an entire web portal or just a landing page, developing a site takes time. Yes, even with all the help from WordPress we all know and love, you will have to spend at least several days to build something worth putting online.
While you are coding, designing and fine-tuning a theme that will power up your website, do you ever think of your domain? Have you just come up with the name of your blog and the domain still sits empty? Is it throwing error in front of your potential customers if you are working on a live site? Instead of that, why wouldn’t you show them a professionally designed under construction page that will let your visitors know what’s going on?
If you like coding and you are relatively good with HTML and CSS, you can create a custom maintenance page. Still, you will have to redirect your visitors and think of a way to keep them away from the rest of your site. Instead, we’ve found a fantastic WordPress plugin that will let you set up everything in just a few clicks. And you know what? It’s completely free!
Under Construction Page
Whether you need an under construction, maintenance, coming soon or a simple landing page, this free WordPress plugin is there for you. Under Construction Page will give you all the options you can want for your site, and by a single click of a button, your website will go under construction mode.
By enabling the maintenance mode, not only that your visitors will get to see a beautiful personalized page, but they will also get to contact you or visit one of your social media profiles. If you are interested in how many people opened your new under construction page, the plugin will collaborate with Google Analytics and tell you that. But more about that later. First, let’s install the plugin and put your website in the under construction mode:
- Install and activate Under Construction Page
- Navigate to Settings -> UnderConstruction -> Main
- Change status button to “on”
Yes, that’s all you had to do to put your site in the maintenance mode. What does that mean? Instead of showing an empty page or a broken site which you are working on, the plugin will show a specially designed page on your site. As you haven’t done any modifications yet, the plugin will show the default info. So, let’s see how fun and easy is creating an under construction page.
Customize your under construction page
The first thing you will want to change is the design of your page. With this free plugin, the entire design can be done just by a few clicks.
The background image will be the first thing your visitors will see, so choose the one you like the most. All the images are professionally designed and will look astonishing on the page. Don’t believe us? Just click a preview button.
Personalize the page
Although images look fantastic, they won’t do much for you without the content. So, open the next tab on the settings page and start customizing the content.
Choose a title for your site, and add a description. Write something catchy as your headline, and explain the situation in a few more details in the content section. You probably don’t want a whole article here, but feel free to write anything you like. Besides text, you can add images and videos, and style the content just like any post in WordPress.
Don’t forget to add links to your social media profiles, and include an email address so that visitors can contact you. Unfortunately, you can’t add a contact form at the moment, but we’re told that the developers are working on the feature as we speak. So, yes, the plugin will get even better!
Whitelist specific user roles
If you open the last tab on the settings page, you will be able to whitelist user roles or specific usernames. By doing so, the plugin will show your regular site to those users, and will never show them the under construction page.
The feature will help administrators who need to get access to a site even while in the maintenance mode.
How many people visited your new page?
In the introduction, we talked about connecting the plugin with Google Analytics. Just by copying the Google Analytics Tracking ID, you will set up the whole thing. After that, every user that opens your under construction page will be tracked.
Just open your Google Analytics account, and you will see the number you’re interested in. We love knowing how many people visited us even while in the maintenance mode, so it was nice to see this option.
As you could have seen from the article, Under Construction Page can quickly help you deal with the maintenance mode. After finishing your work on the site, you don’t have to uninstall the plugin. All it takes is another click of the button to get your site back in the normal mode, while Under Construction Page will quietly sit back and wait for the next time you need it in action.
We’ll leave you with a few images of some of the many options you can create…
