Really Simple Under Construction

v1.5.8 · 600+ active installs · Freemium

A maintenance-mode plugin that does one thing. Hide a page during development, but let the client peek via a private link or a whitelisted IP — no preview-link dance every time you push a change.

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Highlights

503 Service Unavailable response with Retry-After header so search engines come back later instead of indexing the placeholder.
Secret bypass URL with hardened cookie (Secure / HttpOnly / SameSite).
IP whitelist for previewing without logging in.
Logged-in users always pass through — no extra config needed.
Single settings screen. No template gallery, no fonts CDN, no newsletter opt-in.
Plays well with WP-CLI, cron, and the REST API — they're never gated.

What it does

Serves a clean placeholder page to logged-out visitors and returns the correct HTTP status (503 Service Unavailable) with a Retry-After header, so Google and other crawlers don’t treat the placeholder as your real site going dark.

You bypass the page yourself by being logged in or by hitting a secret URL. Whitelist an IP and a client or colleague can preview without an account. No onboarding wizard, no upsell modal, no template gallery — just a small admin screen and the behaviour you came for.