Everyone has their own idea of what a temporary website shutdown is. A new blogger might not care if no one can see anything on the website during development, so they turn off the website until they’re ready to launch. On the other hand, an existing eCommerce store doesn’t have the luxury of shutting down completely. Overall, the reasons for temporarily disabling your WordPress site may vary, but in this article, we will show you how to place your site into maintenance mode with a simple plugin. 

How To Temporarily Disable Your WordPress Site With A Plugin

The WordPress plugin is called Disable Site. It’s a wonderful solution for blocking the entire front end of your WordPress site, while still giving you access to the dashboard/admin area. The thing with the Disable Site plugin is that it’s about as basic as they come. You do get to make a quick message explaining what’s going on to your customers, but you shouldn’t expect any tools for uploading graphics, collecting email addresses or linking to your social media accounts. You can, however, insert whatever HTML code you’d like.

Start by installing and Activating the free Disable Site WordPress plugin. After that, locate the Disable Site tab in your dashboard menu and click on it. This brings you to the only settings page from Disable Site. Start by selecting Yes under Enable Splash Page. The Custom Message field is where you’ll type in a sentence or two to explain to your visitors what’s going on. You can also go into the Custom Output HTML to get more creative and include things like media, customized text and links.

After that, you can save the settings and check your frontend to ensure the plugin is working properly. If you don’t see that your WordPress site is disabled, you probably have to log out of your admin account.

Since this is a temporary fix, go back to the same settings page to disable the splash page whenever you’re ready.