When you are in the process of creating a new WordPress website you might want to keep things private.
You might be playing around with themes and plugins, or just getting to know how WordPress works. You might not be ready to share your website with the world just yet.
This is where “Coming Soon” pages come in to play. You can set up a page known as a “Coming Soon” people will see when they try and visit your website and the only way in which you can see your actual website is if you log into your WordPress admin area.
There are lots of different plugins that you can use to create a “Coming Soon” page, but I personally recommend a plugin called Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode by SeedProd (yep, that’s a long name!).
In this post, I’ll show you how to set up a “Coming Soon” page for your WordPress website.
Firstly, what is the difference between “Coming Soon” and “Maintenance Mode”?
As the name suggests, Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode plugin can be used to create both a “Coming Soon” page and a “Maintenance Mode” page.
Now, you may think that these are both the same things. After all, they are both landing pages that stop visitors from viewing your website.
However, they are actually different and you should make sure you are using the correct option for your situation.
“Coming Soon Mode” is strictly for new WordPress websites.
“Maintenance Mode” is for existing WordPress websites that have been up and running for some time. The “Maintenance Mode” page includes a piece of code that tells search engines that your website is currently down.
How to install the Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode plugin
Let’s start by installing the Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode plugin.
Hover over Plugins in the left-hand menu of WordPress and click on Add New.
Once on the plugins page, use the search bar to search for a plugin called “Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode”. It looks like this:
Click Install Now and when prompted to click Activate.
And that’s it! You are now ready to activate your “Coming Soon” page.
How to activate a “Coming Soon” page
Once you have installed Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode plugin you will see a new item in the left-hand WordPress menu called SeedProd. SeedPro is just the name of the company who developed this plugin.
Hover over this new menu item and click Settings.
You will see a number of settings on this page.
To turn on the “Coming Soon” page select Enable Coming Soon Mode.
Then click Save All Changes.
When you view your website when you are logged into WordPress you will continue to see your website, but when you log out you will see a blank white screen. This is the “Coming Soon” page.
Obviously, a blank white screen isn’t very helpful! It doesn’t tell anyone anything about your website. In fact, if people see this, they might think it’s a broken website.
The great thing about this plugin is that it allows you to easily customise the content and design of your “Coming Soon” page so that you can provide useful information about your website and incorporate your branding.
How to customise your “Coming Soon” page
If you scroll down the settings page you will see a box titled Page Settings.
You can upload a logo, as well as add a headline and a message.
If you have a mailing you might want to add the code for your sign up form to this message box. This is a great way to collect emails while you are in the process of building your website, and then you can notify your mailing list when you launch.
Make sure you switch from Visual mode to Text mode if you are planning on adding any code like this!
If you continue to scroll down the page you will see a box titled Header.
Here you will see options to add information to the header section of your “Coming Soon” page such as a favicon, an SEO title and meta description and your analytics code (such as Google Analytics) if you would like to start tracking visitors to your “Coming Soon” page.
As well as customising the content of your “Coming Soon” page you can also customise the design.
At the top of the settings page, you will see a number of tabs. Click on the Design tab to view all of the design settings.
At the top of the Design page, you will see some Pro Themes that you can only access if you upgrade to the pro version of this plugin. However, if you scroll down this page you will see that you have the ability to customise the background, the content and text on your “Coming Soon” page.
If you scroll right to the bottom of the page you will see that you can even add in your own CSS if you wish.
If you are more confident with coding and would prefer to just create your own “Coming Soon” page, click on the Advanced tab.
On the Advanced settings page, you will see that you can add your own header and footer scripts, and also add your own custom HTML.
Anything you put into the Custom HTML box will override the entire “Coming Soon” page template that is generated by the plugin. This means you will need to set this up exactly as you would set up any HTML document with HTML, head and body tags.
If you are struggling to decide how you want your page to look, I have created a Pinterest board for you full of inspiration. Check it out here.
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