1001Web Maintenance & Launch Pages

1001Web Maintenance & Launch Pages shows a maintenance page or a coming soon page, and it is built for one moment: updating a live site. Switch it on before you update plugins, themes or WordPress, and off when you are done. Three things happen that a plain maintenance page does not do. 1. Page caching is suspended, then restored When maintenance is switched on, the plugin saves the settings it is about to change, then:

• switches off the page cache in the settings of WP Fastest Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, Hummingbird, Breeze and SiteGround Optimizer;
• removes the .htaccess blocks of WP Fastest Cache (page cache, browser cache and compression), WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache, which let the server deliver cached pages before WordPress runs;
• empties the page caches of these plugins and of WP Rocket, WP-Optimize, Cache Enabler and Seraphinite Accelerator, the CSS/JS caches of WP Fastest Cache, LiteSpeed and Autoptimize, and the object cache;
• runs its Cache Guard, built into the plugin (no file is added to your site). On every public page while maintenance lasts, it defines DONOTCACHEPAGE and sends no-cache headers; at most once a minute, it also deletes the files in the cache folders it knows (pages, and the CSS/JS files of WP Fastest Cache and LiteSpeed) and asks a LiteSpeed server to purge its cache. WP Rocket is kept from writing new cache files. WordPress loads plugins in alphabetical order, so this plugin runs before the cache plugins it guards.

When maintenance is switched off, the caches are emptied again. Only the values the plugin switched off are put back, and only if they still hold the value it set: a setting you change in the meantime is kept. The .htaccess file is restored byte for byte if nobody else changed it; otherwise only the removed cache blocks are added back, at the top. The file handled is the one your web server reads for the site address, also when WordPress lives in its own folder. These changes need direct file access: if WordPress writes files through FTP or SSH on your server, maintenance is not switched on and the plugin tells you why. Varnish, Nginx and CDN caches such as Cloudflare are not changed. The check below shows whether one of them still serves the normal site. 2. The 503 is checked, not assumed Right after you switch maintenance on, your server requests the home page at its public address, without cookies, as an anonymous visitor would. It shows what came back: whether it is the maintenance page, the HTTP status, the Retry-After header, and whether caching is forbidden. When your domain points to a proxy or a CDN, the request goes through it, so a CDN that still serves a cached copy is caught. Some hosts resolve their own domain internally and skip the CDN: the plugin cannot detect this, so if your site is behind a CDN, confirm once in a private window. A security challenge from a CDN or a firewall cannot be judged, and a WordPress error page is reported as a failure: in both cases the panel says so. The Diagnostic tab runs the same check on demand. 3. Key pages are compared before and after Just before maintenance starts, the plugin records the HTTP status and the size of up to six pages: the home page, the static front page, the posts page, the WooCommerce shop page, then the top-level items of the menu in your theme's main location (with a block theme, or without a menu, your top-level pages). When maintenance ends, it requests them again and flags any page that now returns an error or lost more than half of its HTML. A page that does not answer within 5 seconds, and a page that could not be compared ("Not checked"), give a warning, never an "all fine" result. Slower answers are shown but not flagged. These requests follow up to two redirects and, like WordPress's own requests to itself, do not verify the TLS certificate (filter https_local_ssl_verify). If a page broke, one click puts the site back in maintenance while you fix it, and the comparison keeps the healthy record. The latest result stays visible in the General tab, under "Last update check", with a button to check again. Developers can change the list of pages with the mgenius_healthcheck_urls filter. Cache handling and the page comparison also run when a schedule starts or ends maintenance, and when a countdown ends it. After such an automatic end, the comparison runs in the background through WP-Cron. The maintenance page Visitors see a maintenance page (HTTP 503 with Retry-After) or a coming-soon page (HTTP 200 with noindex), with:

• design presets, colours, bundled fonts, background image or video, Lottie animations;
• a countdown, which can end maintenance automatically, and scheduled maintenance;
• a "Notify me" form that emails subscribers when the site is back online;
• access for chosen people: administrators (unless their IP address or user agent is on the blacklist), plus roles, IP addresses, URLs, a visitor password and time-limited access links;
• a blacklist of IP addresses and user agents, with an optional log of blocked attempts. It also applies when maintenance is off, to pages generated by WordPress; outside maintenance, a page served directly by a page cache does not reach it;
• while maintenance is on, the core REST API content routes (/wp-json/wp/v2/) answer 503 to visitors who cannot see the site either; editors, administrators and the people you let in keep access, and a setting in the Advanced tab turns this off;
• a setup wizard that can write the title and message for you (in a professional, friendly or humorous tone, with when you will be back and how to reach you), a Diagnostic tab with 8 checks, a searchable knowledge base, a help button on the settings screen and settings export and import.

Every feature of this plugin is free: no licence key, no locked feature and no time limit. Privacy GDPR mode is on by default: the maintenance page loads no animation hosted on another website. All fonts are bundled with the plugin, so nothing is ever loaded from Google Fonts. The checks described above only request your own site, unless one of its pages redirects elsewhere. Optional services you enable yourself, and content hosted on another website, are listed under External Services.

2.9.181

• Support tab, Useful Links: a new button opens the setup wizard again. Nothing changes until its last step, and "Skip wizard" changes nothing.
• Diagnostic and "Last update check": a result saved in another language is now flagged, with a prompt to run the check again, instead of being shown as is.
• Visitor page: a title or message still equal to an English default (never edited) now shows the default text in the site language.
• Diagnostic: with WP-Cron disabled, the check now looks at the task queue. If no task is more than 30 minutes late, it confirms that a server cron job runs them, instead of always warning.
• Visitor statistics: the numbers no longer overlap their labels, and the "Since" date follows the site date format.
• Readme: the support request section no longer shows an internal email address.

2.9.180

• In Coming Soon mode (and in maintenance without the 503 option), robots.txt now returns a plain "Disallow: /" file and XML sitemaps return 404, instead of the HTML page with a 200 that crawlers read as an invalid file. The 503 maintenance page is unchanged.
• On a multisite network, network activation is now refused with an explanation (multisite was already documented as not supported).
• The Retry-After setting is now capped at 168 hours (7 days) on the server too, not only in the form.
• The critical diagnostic banner uses the same warning icon as the rest of the plugin.
• Turning maintenance mode on now asks for confirmation (settings switch, floating button, admin bar and admin menu), so a stray click can no longer take the site offline. Turning it off stays immediate.

2.9.179

• Initial release on WordPress.org.