Maintenance Mode Mods

Over on the Anti (Social) Development, there is an interesting suggestion to use a Wordpress plugin (the maintenance mode plugin) that you run when you are testing new themes, changing layouts, upgrading Wordpress, or doing other maintenance. The idea is that readers hitting your site while maintenance is underway will not get spurious error messages or see a problematic layout and be turned off.

At first glance this seems like a good idea, but the maintenance mode page suggested is very terse. Instead, of using something so simple I would gloss over the fact that the site is “down” or in maintenance mode and, as with one’s missing page 404 error page, I think it would be a good idea to create a static page that would include a stack of useful information, links, and some graphics like the site logo, that will guide visitors to your RSS feed or other flagship website content on static pages that don’t rely on your blog not being in maintenance mode.

I described a similar technique that can be used to replace your server not found error page, so that when your site really goes down, rather than you putting it into maintenance mode, visitors are left, not with a standard Wordpress error, but a nice informative page pointing them to your newsfeed, other sites, etc.

I think it’s important to display a standard error message somewhere on the page, but not to specifically tell casual or first-time visitors who hit your site at a bad time that they are seeing anything but a fully operational site. Most people don’t care about the inner workings of your blog or website. No, they probably don’t even care about your site, they just want the information they need, there and then.

If you do not present them with something useful right now, they are very unlikely to check back later to see whether you’ve fixed your site and can solve their problem hours later. They will simply move on to another site.