How to Activate Maintenance Mode for WooCommerce
Are you planning to implement significant changes to your WooCommerce without hampering the rest of your site? Making your woo-commerce store appear unavailable or broken can have adverse impacts on your site’s availability and trustworthiness. You can simply activate the maintenance mode for WooCommerce to display a customized and enticing message to your users instead of displaying a broken or down site. If you want to know How to Activate Maintenance Mode for WooCommerce, you have landed at the perfect place. In this tutorial, we’ll display the complete process of activating maintenance mode in WP.
So, without further ado, let’s get started.
Why Activate maintenance mode for WooCommerce
Running a website uninterruptedly is all that we need. But there could be multiple reasons why you may want to put your WooCommerce in maintenance mode.
For instance, you may want to redesign your store completely while keeping the rest of your site live. Or, there could be some issues with your online store, such as payment processing issues, email delivery issues, or checkout errors, which can hurt your store user experience. Or, if you intend to add an online store to your existing site and keep it private while you work on it, enabling maintenance mode can be a smart option.
A website’s user experience is one of the most valuable aspects that can make or break a website. Making changes live on your site is not a recommended method, as it can hamper your site’s user experience. In addition, keeping your site unavailable or down while site maintenance also hurts the user experience.
Therefore, it’s always best to activate maintenance mode in WooCommerce, while you make changes to it. With this, you can display an engaging, customized message on your page to inform your users about the ongoing update. In addition, you can even encourage your users to the new update or launch, which can create a sense of excitement.
With that said, let’s explore how easily you can activate WooCommerce in WordPress without impacting the rest of your site.
How to Activate Maintenance Mode for WooCommerce
In this section, we’ll show you how you can set up maintenance mode for WooCommerce with two different plugins:
1. Maintenance Mode For WooCommerce.
The ‘Maintenance Mode For WooCommerce’ is the simplest, easy-to-set-up, and above all, a ‘free’ plugin that lets you easily enable maintenance mode for your WooCommerce without impacting your entire website. The plugin is used by over 1000+ users and provides you with complete flexibility. You can decide on the text or the content that you like to show on your maintenance mode page.
To use this plugin on your WooCommerce, you are required to install and activate the plugin.
For this, you need to download and then upload the maintenance-mode-for-woocommerce.zip file to the /wp-content/plugin/directory. Then from your admin dashboard, navigate to Plugins >> ‘Maintenance Mode for WooCommerce’ plugin and then activate the plugin.
After that, navigate to settings in the WooCommerce menu under maintenance mode. Then create a page and enter the text of the content you want to display to your users. Once done, save your settings and publish to make it live.
Ensure to deactivate the plugin once you are done with the changes on your WooCommerce store. That’s it. This was all about the user-friendly plugin.
2. SeedProd
The next amazing and customizable plugin in our list is SeedProd. It is a featureful, drag-and-drop landing page builder that lets you create beautiful and engaging coming-soon pages and enhance your 404-page experience. In addition, you can also design different types of landing pages with ease using SeedProd.
The plugin is available as a free as well as paid version. The free version allows you easily create a maintenance mode page. But to only keep the WooCommerce store under maintenance mode while keeping the rest of the website live, we’d need the paid version.
For this tutorial, we’ll use the paid version of SeedProd. So, let’s get started!
Install and activate SeedProd.
To begin with SeedProd, first, install and activate the plugin on your site. If you need help in the plugin installation process, refer to our guide on plugin installation in WP.
Once activated, you need to enter the Licence Key. You can discover your key in your account details on the SeedProd website.
Place your license key and then click on the ‘Verify key’ tab to continue. Once you are done, you can begin working on your maintenance mode page.
Coming soon vs. maintenance page.
In order to create a Maintenance Mode Page for your WooCommerce, navigate to SeedProd >> Pages. Now you’ll see two different page options, the coming soon page and the maintenance page. Continue reading to learn how they differ and which you should choose.
With a ‘Coming Soon’ page, search engines can still discover and crawl the pages of your store. This offers the opportunity to search engines to index your WooCommerce store. So, if you are creating an online store, you might desire to go ahead with a Coming Soon Page.
On the contrary, a Maintenance Mode Page indicates to search engines that your website is temporarily down for maintenance, using a distinct header code 503. Seeing this code, the search crawler will return to check your website later to determine whether it is back online or not. This allows you to hide your WooCommerce store from your users without hampering its search ranking.
Create a Maintenance Mode Page
If you are making your site temporarily unavailable, you must choose the Maintenance Mode page. Although the steps are identical for both pages, let’s continue with the Maintenance Mode page.
So, click on the Maintenance Mode page in the page section to create a page for your users. On the next screen, select a pre-made template or a fresh blank page.
For this tutorial, we are using the ‘Celebrate Coming Soon’ template. You can begin with a template that you like the most.
In order to select a template, hover your mouse over the preferred template and then click on the ‘Checkmark’ icon. Once done, a drag-and-drop builder will open where you can customize your page’s design.
Now, you’ll witness two parallel sides. On your screen’s left side, you can see the blocks and sections that you can include on your page. On its right, you can see the live preview of how the changes will look.
Note that some helpful blocks are already incorporated with most of the pre-made templates. So, you can easily customize these blocks to give a personalized touch. You can add links, text, and images to modify the page appearance as per your choice.
Now, to change the text in the text block or headline, you need to select the block in your layout. Once selected, it will open up the settings for that block.
Enter your text into the text editor that you want to display. There you can also change the text style (bold, italic), font size, text alignment, and more as you like.
In addition, you can also add more blocks from the left menu to your page through the drag-and-drop feature. For instance, you can add a custom logo by simply dragging and dropping the ‘image’ block onto your page layout.
Then click on the blog, and you can customize the particular from the left menu. In order to add your logo, click on ‘Use Your Own Image.’ Note that you can choose an image from your WP media library or upload an image directly from your computer.
Once done, you can also add image alt text, embed a link, change the image size, or more from your left menu. Similarly, you can drag and drop a block from your left menu and add it to your page. And you can customize the same block by selecting it and editing it from the same left menu.
Now, if you want to remove a block from your design, you need to click on the block and then select the trash icon. Additionally, you can also alter the position of your blocks around the page using the drag-and-drop feature.
Once you are happy with the modifications and the appearance of your maintenance page, click on the ‘Save’ tab to store your settings.
Activate Maintenance or Coming Soon Mode for your WooCommerce store
Once you successfully create a custom maintenance mode or coming soon page, you need to enable it for your website.
Note that we don’t want to put the whole website under maintenance mode, but only the WooCommerce store. For this, you need to modify the settings. Navigate to the SeedProd editor and click on the ‘Page Settings’ tab. After that, click on the ‘Access Control’ tab.
Under this setting, you can set where you want to display your Maintenance mode page or coming soon page on your website and who can see your maintenance mode page.
Now, to put your WooCommerce store into maintenance mode, scroll down and look for the ‘Include/Exclude URLs’ section. Once there, click on the ‘Include URLs’ tab.
There, enter the URL of your WooCommerce store. Note that you have to add all the main URLs of your WooCommerce store. You can simply start with the pages that are automatically created by WooCommerce. The following are the examples:
- https://abc.com/shop
- https://abc.com/cart
- https://abc.com/checkkout
- https://abc.com/my-account
Your site might have product pages. So, in addition to these, you need to add the URLs of your product pages.
The following are examples. Also, make sure to include the asterisk symbol. This will signal SeedProd to add all the URLs that are similar to the pattern before it.
- https://abc.com/product/*
- https://abc.com/product-category/*
- https://abc.com/product-tag/*
This setting is crucial because it will display to users the maintenance page when they try to access any product, product-category or product-tag. Once you have added all these URLs, don’t forget to store your settings. For this, click on the ‘Save’ tab to store your changes.
Put your WooCommerce store in Maintenance Mode.
Once you are done with all the page activation settings, you can now put your WooCommerce store in Maintenance Mode or the coming soon page whenever you want.
For this, simply login to your admin dashboard and navigate to SeedProd >>Landing pages. On the next screen, you’ll witness that the slider under Maintenance mode or the coming soon page is ‘Inactive.’ Now, click on the ‘Inactive’ slider to ‘Active’ to make your changes live.
Once done, you can visit your WooCommerce store to see your ‘Maintenance Mode’ page in action.
How to deactivate your Maintenance mode?
Once you have made all the updates and changes and your store is ready to go live, you need to deactivate the maintenance mode.
For this, simply navigate to SeedProd >>Landing page. There, click on the ‘Active’ slider to ‘Inactive’ to remove the maintenance mode page and make your WooCommerce store live.
Now, you may visit your WooCommerce store to see your newly updated WooCommerce store. Now, anyone can explore your online store and take advantage of the services or make a purchase.
Maintain your user experience with Maintenance mode!
So, this was all concerning how you can activate maintenance mode on your WooCommerce store. It’s an effective way to maintain user experience and search ranking of your site. In addition, you can entice and encourage your site users to stay connected.
Enabling maintenance mode might seem daunting at the beginning, but SeedProd makes it easy. It’s a featureful and customizable plugin that lets you easily create nearly any kind of landing page. And that, too, is engaging and attractive. Here, we’ve covered step by step how easily you can integrate SeedProd with your website and how easily you can activate and deactivate maintenance mode on it.
We hope this easy and detailed guide has helped you learn something new and valuable and enabled you to create and activate maintenance mode on WooCommerce.
Once you successfully update your website, don’t forget to deactivate the maintenance mode to make your store live.
If you are new to WooCommerce, you can also check our guide on adding products, tags, and attributes to WooCommerce.