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.
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.
Features
- 503 Service Unavailable response with
Retry-Afterheader 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.
Install
Need scheduled go-live, a designed launch page, a countdown, an email signup form, or CIDR whitelisting? See Really Simple Under Construction PRO.