All 47 Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode answers
Answer
Does maintenance mode hurt my search rankings?
Not if you pick Maintenance: Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode then answers 503 with a Retry-After header, which tells a crawler to come back later.
The two modes answer search engines differently, on purpose:
- Maintenance is for a site that exists and is briefly away. A
503(service unavailable) asks a crawler to call again rather than record your holding page as the site's content.Retry-Afteris worked out from your Switch off at time when you set one; without one it says an hour, and anything further away than a day says a day. - Coming soon answers
200, the normal status. That is right for a site that does not exist yet, and wrong for one that is briefly away.
Your robots.txt and sitemap stay open in both modes. Settings → Search Appearance can ask search engines not to index the holding page, and once the site opens, the Dashboard tells you if WordPress's own Discourage search engines setting is still ticked.
Still stuck? Ask the developers who wrote it. We aim to reply within one business day.
Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode
Put your site behind a coming soon or maintenance page and collect the email addresses of everyone waiting for it.
From $19 a year · every feature · 30-day refund
