Really Simple Under Construction: a maintenance-mode plugin that does one thing

Why does turning your site off for an hour need 30 dependencies?

Most “coming soon” and maintenance-mode plugins on wp.org behave like landing-page builders that happen to also block the front end. You install one to hide your site for a deploy and end up with a template gallery, a fonts CDN, an opt-in to their newsletter, and 600 KB of JavaScript on a page that says “Be right back.”

I wanted the opposite: a tiny plugin that puts a maintenance page in front of visitors, gets out of the way for me, and ships nothing I don’t need. That’s Really Simple Under Construction.

What it actually does

• Serves a clean placeholder page to logged-out visitors.
• Returns the correct HTTP status (503 Service Unavailable) with a Retry-After header, so Google and other crawlers don’t index the placeholder or treat it as your real site going dark.
• Lets you bypass the page yourself with a secret URL or by being logged in.
• Whitelists IPs so a client or a colleague can preview without an account.
• Has a small admin screen. No onboarding wizard, no upsell modal.

That’s the whole surface area.

Three places I actually use it

A planned launch. A new site is staged behind the maintenance page while DNS propagates and final content lands. The day you flip it live, you toggle one switch.

A maintenance window. Pushing a database migration or a risky plugin update? Turn the page on for 20 minutes, do the work, turn it off. The 503 + Retry-After response means search engines will come back later instead of mistaking a broken state for a permanent one.

Hiding a dev or staging site from search bots. A noindex tag is a suggestion. A 503 is not. If you don’t want a staging copy showing up in search results, this is a more honest way to say so.

v1.5.x: small security tightening

The recent 1.5 releases hardened the secret-URL bypass cookie, made the 503 + Retry-After response the default rather than an option, and cleaned up a handful of edge cases around login redirects. Nothing flashy. Just the stuff you want a maintenance plugin to get right.

If you want more

If you need a designed launch page, a countdown, scheduled go-live, or an email signup form, there’s a paid Pro add-on. If you don’t, the free plugin is the whole product, and it stays that way.

Get Really Simple Under Construction on wp.org