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Labinator Minimal Maintenance Mode

v2.0.0 · by Labinator

Coming-soon and maintenance mode in one switch, with your own page as the notice and a private link for reviewers.

About this plugin

Labinator Minimal Maintenance Mode closes your site to visitors while you build or update it, and opens it again with one click.

Two modes

  • Coming soon: for a site that is not live yet. Visitors get the notice with a normal response and a noindex tag, so search engines do not index it.
  • Maintenance: for a live site you are working on. Visitors get the notice with a 503 Service Unavailable response and a Retry-After header, which tells search engines the outage is temporary.

What it covers

  • Every front-end URL: pages, posts, archives, search, feeds and the XML sitemap.
  • The REST API, which would otherwise keep serving your content while the site is closed.
  • Full-page caches: the notice is sent with no-cache headers and the DONOTCACHEPAGE flag, so a caching plugin or CDN does not keep serving it after you reopen.

    wp-login.php and the dashboard are never blocked, so you cannot lock yourself out.

Who sees the real site

  • Logged-in users who can publish posts (Authors and up). The admin bar shows that the site is closed, so nobody forgets.
  • Anyone you send the private link to. Opening it lets that browser see the real site until it is closed. You can replace the link at any time, which revokes access for everyone using the old one.

Your own notice

Pick any published page as the notice, or use the built-in one. The notice is a standalone page: it loads only the block styles your page uses, with none of your theme’s menus or other plugins’ scripts. The built-in notice is accessible, works on phones, and follows the visitor’s light or dark preference.

Minimal

One settings screen, three settings, no tracking, no external requests, and no upsells. While the site is online, the front end reads one cached setting and does nothing else.

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