Maintenance mode

Turn this on and everyone except administrators sees a simple notice with a heading, description and estimated time you write. Administrators continue to see the live site normally, so you can work on it while visitors see the holding page. Logged-in editors, authors and subscribers see the notice too.

The part that separates this from most maintenance mode plugins is the HTTP status. Vectro returns 503 Service Unavailable with a Retry-After header, rather than a normal 200 response containing maintenance text.

That distinction sounds pedantic and is not. It is the difference between a search engine understanding you are briefly down and a search engine indexing your holding page as your actual content.

The Maintenance module is off by default on a new install. Switch it on from the Vectro dashboard before this feature can run.

When a crawler requests a page and receives 200 OK, it takes the response at face value: this is the content at this URL. If that content is “we will be back shortly”, that is what gets indexed and what appears in search results. Do it across a whole site for a day and the damage takes far longer than a day to undo.

A 503 with Retry-After says something entirely different: the server is temporarily unavailable, do not index this, come back later. Crawlers respect it and retain what they already had.

Vectro intercepts front-end requests on template_redirect and, unless the visitor is an administrator, returns a 503 Service Unavailable response carrying your notice, along with a Retry-After header of one hour. Administrators, WP-CLI and WP-Cron are excluded, and wp-admin itself is never blocked, so the site remains fully usable for you.

Because the check happens before the theme’s templates load, the holding page does not use your theme’s templates. That makes it usable while you are actively changing or debugging the theme itself.