How-to · Beginner · 10 minutes
How to Put WordPress in Maintenance Mode
Everything you need to put a tidy curtain in front of work that is not ready to be seen — the steps in order, the snag to watch, and the tip our support desk gives everybody.
Straight answer first
In a line: put a tidy curtain in front of work that is not ready to be seen — a beginner-level task that takes 10 minutes.
The walkthrough below covers every step, the mistake most people make, and the shortcut worth keeping. On Hosting Seller plans several of these steps are already done for you, and we say where.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Beginner
Difficulty level
10 minutes
Time to allow
5
Stages
24/7
Help at any hour
This guide assumes no expertise at all — just a hosting account, a browser and 10 minutes of attention. Every instruction works on our platform exactly as written, and carries over to any standard cPanel host.
Rule of the road: read the snag section before you begin rather than after. It is harvested from the tickets of people who did it the other way round.
The shape of the work
The job breaks into a few clear stages: match the tool to how long the job takes, let yourself through the curtain, send the correct status code back, keep the curtain plain and short and take it down promptly.
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking — the time it takes depends mostly on how familiar the control panel already feels. The detailed steps sit further down this page; skim the whole route once before you begin.
Where this goes wrong, and how not to
Serving the maintenance page with a 200 status. Search engines take that as your actual content and index the placeholder, which is precisely the opposite of what a temporary state should be telling them.
Forewarned really is forearmed here. This one mistake accounts for most of the frustration the subject produces, and it is entirely avoidable once somebody names it.
One habit that makes this easy for good
Most small edits do not need a curtain at all. WordPress applies changes cleanly enough that visitors rarely catch anything mid-flight. Save maintenance mode for the rebuilds that genuinely leave the site in pieces.
It costs a minute now and pays that back every time the job comes round again — which, like most hosting jobs, it certainly will.
What runs by itself here
Several steps in this guide exist only because hosting historically made you do them. On our plans SSL issues itself, backups run daily without being asked, and one-click installers replace the manual setup entirely. What is left is the part that is genuinely yours.
Stuck halfway through at an odd hour? That is exactly what round-the-clock human support is for — tell us where you are in this guide and we will pick it up from there.
Why the job is simpler on our plans
Tutorials age badly when they are written against imaginary hosting. These are written against ours: the same panel, the same installer and the same defaults you will meet.
Backups run every day on every plan, and putting a file or a database back takes one click from the panel.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Scoped honestly
Put a tidy curtain in front of work that is not ready to be seen is a beginner-level task — this guide budgets 10 minutes and says which steps the platform absorbs.
Help on the counter
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-guide included.
Automation where it belongs
SSL, backups and installs run themselves here, so the guide covers only what is genuinely yours to do.
5 steps, no filler
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking, with the fiddly parts marked as fiddly.
No jargon toll
Terms are explained where they appear or linked to the glossary — nothing assumes you already know.
Works exactly as written
Every step tested on the platform we run — no 'your host may differ' hand-waving anywhere.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Match the tool to how long the job takes
A maintenance plugin suits an afternoon of work. For a rebuild running over weeks, a proper coming-soon page that collects email addresses does considerably more for you than a closed sign.
- 2
Let yourself through the curtain
Configure it so logged-in administrators still see the real site while everyone else sees the curtain. You need to be able to check your own work as you go without switching the whole thing off.
- 3
Send the correct status code back
The page should return 503 with a retry hint attached. That tells search engines this is temporary and to come back, rather than inviting them to index your placeholder or mark the site as gone.
- 4
Keep the curtain plain and short
A logo, one sentence, and a way to get in touch or sign up. A maintenance page is a note in the window, not a letter of apology, and nobody reads past the second line anyway.
- 5
Take it down promptly
Maintenance mode left on after the work finished is downtime you inflicted on yourself. Set a reminder at the same moment you switch it on and the problem never arises.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- One-click installs for WordPress and 400+ other applications
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- A free SSL certificate on every plan, reissued before it lapses
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- LiteSpeed caching running at the server, not bolted on by plugin
- Real people on the counter, every hour of every day
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Is maintenance mode bad for search rankings?
A few hours behind a proper 503, no — crawlers take it as exactly the temporary state it declares itself to be. Days or weeks argues for a real coming-soon page that is indexable and useful, rather than a long-running closed sign.
The site is stuck in maintenance mode after an update — help?
The update crashed part way through and left a .maintenance flag file behind in the site root. Delete that file through File Manager and the site returns immediately, then run the interrupted update again from the dashboard.
How do I pay, and does it bill again on its own?
Orders go through a secure checkout by credit or debit card, and the renewal is taken at the same price you first paid. Every invoice sits in the client area for you to read, and switching auto-renewal off is a toggle in your account rather than a phone call.
What does round-the-clock support actually stretch to?
People at the counter at every hour, and a scope that takes in the practical work: mailbox setup, DNS records, WordPress trouble, restores. Not 'the server responds, ticket closed'. Ask us something hard before you order — the reply is a fair sample of what you would get afterwards.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
Who actually runs the company?
Hosting Seller is a trading name of Bohzo Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales — a real business with a public record and terms published under English law. Looking that up is worth doing about any host before you hand over your domain.
What uptime do you commit to, and who is watching?
We commit to 99.9% uptime and watch it continuously. That figure is an operational target rather than a poster line, and the alerting behind it usually has an engineer on a problem before the first customer notices anything is wrong.
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A plain running order for a move nobody notices: what to copy first, how to carry email across without dropping a single message, when to point DNS, and the two slips behind nearly every hour of downtime we get called about.
Do the launch properly this time.
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