How to put WordPress into “Maintenance Mode”

One thing that many people don’t know about WordPress is that it comes with the built-in ability to put itself into “Maintenance Mode”. This can come in super handy while you’re developing, switching, upgrading, or troubleshooting your WordPress site. It will give you (or any user with the ability to sign into the admin area of WordPress) the ability to sign into WordPress and see your site as you normally would while your visitors / users see a completely separate splash page or even a completely different site. For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll just stick to a splash page.

Below are the steps to put WordPress into, and easily get it out of, “Maintenance Mode”. For this tutorial, you’ll need to make sure that you can see / edit hidden files (files that begin with a “.”) in your file system or FTP client.

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