Signocore Toolkit can replace your site with a single page while you work on it or before it launches. You choose who still sees the real site, and the page tells search engines what is going on.
Choose a mode
Go to Signocore Toolkit → Maintenance, pick a Mode in the Status card and click Save Changes.
| Mode | HTTP status | Search engines | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Off | Normal | Normal | A live site. This is the default. |
| Maintenance (temporarily unavailable) | 503 with a Retry-After header |
Told the site is temporarily down and when to come back, so rankings are kept | Short work on a live site, such as an update or a migration |
| Coming soon | 200 | noindex, nofollow, both as an HTTP header and a meta tag, so the page stays out of search results |
A new site that has not launched yet |
Both modes show the same page to visitors, with texts that fit the mode.
Important: Keep maintenance mode short. Search engines accept a 503 for a while, but when it lasts for days they can start to drop pages. And do not switch a site that is already in search results to Coming soon: its
noindextells search engines to remove the pages.
Choose who sees the real site
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Who Can See the Site | Editors and administrators | Logged-in users with this role or higher see the normal site. The other choices are Administrators and All logged-in users. |
| Allowed IP Addresses | Empty | Visitors from these addresses see the normal site without logging in. One IP address or CIDR range per line. |
Logged-in users below the chosen role see the maintenance page like any visitor. Allowed IP addresses are detected with the IP Detection setting on the Security tab, so check it if your site runs behind Cloudflare or a proxy, see IP detection behind Cloudflare or a proxy.
These keep working for everyone while a mode is on: the login page (including a hidden login page), the admin area, the REST API, background requests from WordPress, scheduled tasks, robots.txt and the favicon.
Write the page
The Page Content card sets what visitors see. Every field is optional.
| Setting | What it shows | When empty |
|---|---|---|
| Logo | An image from the media library | Your theme's logo, then the site icon, then the site name as text |
| Headline | The main heading | "We'll be back soon" in maintenance mode, "Coming soon" in coming soon mode |
| Message | The text below the headline. Basic HTML is allowed, and line breaks become paragraphs | "We are performing scheduled maintenance. The website will be available again shortly." or "Our new website is on its way. Please check back soon." |
| Expected Back | A date and time, shown on the page as Expected back | Nothing is shown |
| Contact Email | A Contact link that opens the visitor's email program | Nothing is shown |
Expected Back uses the timezone under Settings → General. In maintenance mode it also sets the Retry-After header, which tells search engines when to check again. Without a date, or once the date has passed, the header says one hour and the date disappears from the page.
The built-in page takes its colors and fonts from your theme where it can: from block themes and theme styles, and from the Kadence and Signocore Slate theme settings. Fonts that those themes load from Google Fonts are not used, and the page falls back to a system font instead.
Switch modes from the admin bar
Administrators see a maintenance menu in the admin bar, on the frontend and in the admin area. Its label shows the current state: Maintenance Mode: Off, Maintenance Mode: On or Coming Soon: On.
- Click the label to open the maintenance settings. A click on the label never changes the mode.
- Hover over it to switch: Turn on maintenance mode, Turn on coming soon page or Turn off, make the site public again. The menu only lists the modes that are not active.
While a mode is on, every admin screen shows administrators a notice with a Settings button and a Turn off button, and the Maintenance Mode card on the Overview tab shows the mode.
Caching
The maintenance page is sent with headers that tell browsers and caches not to store it, and it tells caching plugins to skip it.
Each time the mode changes, from the settings page or the admin bar, the Toolkit clears the page cache of WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, WP-Optimize, LiteSpeed Cache, SpinupWP and WP-FFPC. Without that, cached pages would keep showing the old state.
Note: A CDN such as Cloudflare or a server cache from your host is not cleared. Purge it yourself right after you turn a mode on, and again after you turn it off.
Use your own template
To design the page yourself, copy the plugin's template into your theme:
- Copy
wp-content/plugins/signocore-toolkit/templates/maintenance.php. - Save it in your theme as
signocore-toolkit/maintenance.php, so the path is/signocore-toolkit/maintenance.php. Use a child theme if you have one, so a theme update does not remove the file. WordPress looks in the child theme first, then in the parent theme. - Edit the copy.
The Toolkit uses your template for both modes. It still sends the status code and headers before your template runs, and it still decides who sees the page. The template must print a complete HTML page, because the theme's header and footer are not loaded.
Your template gets these values in $args:
| Value | Contains |
|---|---|
$args['mode'] |
maintenance or coming_soon |
$args['headline'] |
The headline, or the default for the mode |
$args['message'] |
The message as HTML, or the default for the mode |
$args['logoUrl'] |
The logo URL, or an empty string |
$args['backAt'] |
The Expected Back time as a Unix timestamp, or null |
$args['contactEmail'] |
The contact email address, or an empty string |
$args['themeCss'] |
CSS custom properties with your theme's colors and fonts |
Escape the values when you print them, as the plugin's own template does.
Developers can also load a template from somewhere else with the signocore_toolkit_maintenance_template filter, add markup to the default page with the signocore_toolkit_maintenance_head and signocore_toolkit_maintenance_footer actions, and react to a mode change, for example to purge another cache, with signocore_toolkit_maintenance_changed. See Hooks and JavaScript events.