Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode features

Coming soon says your site is not live yet, and the address works like any other page, so you can share it while you build. Maintenance answers 503 with a Retry-After, so a crawler comes back instead of replacing your site with a holding page in its index.

Four of them arrange the page rather than colour it: Ledger's full-width thin lines, Rail's band of colour down the edge, Corner's words in the bottom corner of your picture, Postcard's picture across the top of a wide card. Pick one and override any of its four colours. No page builder, no template files, and every bit of motion stops for a reader who has asked for less.

It is drawn with the right numbers already in it, so it reads correctly before any script runs, and it measures the visitor's clock against your server so a phone that is an hour fast still counts down to the right moment.

Switch one setting on and they see your own design and logo instead, with words of your own and a 503 that tells search engines to come back, even while this plugin is the one being updated. Another plugin's maintenance file is never overwritten, and on a network each site switched on gets its own page.

With WooCommerce, a third mode keeps every page open and indexable and only pauses buying: the Add to cart button goes, carts and the checkout refuse, and a notice says so, with the day you take orders again when you set a switch-off time. Keep gift cards on sale, let chosen roles still buy, or keep taking orders and only tell shoppers when they will be sent out. Nobody on your list is emailed when you reopen.

Switch the launch email on, and when you open, the plugin emails everybody who asked (it checks with you first when you open by hand, and when the scheduled opening runs more than a week late): in small batches, plain text, with a one-click unsubscribe, and nobody written to twice. Put the page back up while it is going out and it stops.

Only the time they confirmed is kept, nothing about their browser or connection. Addresses nobody confirms are deleted after 30 days, and people already on your list stay on it. The Subscribers screen lists the people still waiting on a tab of their own. Off until you switch it on.

Remove one and only that person is out. The list shows the day each link was last used, and nothing more about who used it.

The same tick lists, searchable fields and address patterns every Traslatability plugin uses to decide where it applies.

Stored the way WordPress stores yours, five wrong guesses and that visitor waits a quarter of an hour, and changing it signs out everyone using the old one.

Anyone who can change the setting always gets through, so unticking your own role cannot lock you out of your own front end. Switch on the Sign in link and the people you let in can sign in from the page itself and come back to the page they asked for.

WordPress's own form, a network's sign-up page, and WooCommerce's My account and checkout refuse new accounts with one plain sentence, so a site nobody has heard of yet does not collect accounts from bots. Signing in still works, the people you let in can still register, and one switch allows sign-ups if you want them before launch.

Both are compared on every request as well as scheduled, so the site opens on the minute even on a host whose cron has not run for a fortnight.

Once your site is open, the Dashboard says so while it is, with one button that unticks it and one that keeps it, and names a robots.txt file that asks every search engine to keep away. Nothing is said on a staging or local copy.