About this plugin
This plugin is built for renewing part of a live site: you pick the individual pages that are being reworked, and only those pages go into maintenance. The rest of the site stays online and fully indexable.
Most maintenance plugins cover the whole site and stop at the HTML front end. That leaves the pages you are hiding reachable through other public surfaces — the REST API, the sitemap, RSS feeds, oEmbed, and the site’s own search results and archive listings. This plugin closes those surfaces for the targeted pages as well, so a page under maintenance does not resurface somewhere else on the same site.
The second half of the plugin is the review loop. While a page is under maintenance, you can issue a secret preview link that lets a client open the real page without a WordPress account, then revoke it when the review is done.
Features
- Per-page or site-wide scope — apply maintenance mode to selected pages or posts of any public post type, or to the entire site.
- Correct 503 responses — sends 503 Service Unavailable in place (no redirect) with Retry-After and noindex headers, so search engines understand the downtime is temporary.
- Content-leak protection — helps prevent exposure of targeted pages through the public REST API, search endpoint, WordPress’s built-in sitemap, feeds, oEmbed, and the site’s own front-end search results and archive listings (see FAQ for SEO-plugin sitemaps). This also covers the places WordPress builds without a normal post query: the site-wide comment feed, recent-comment listings, previous/next post navigation, and title-based archive lists.
- Navigation menu exclusion — menu entries that point at a targeted page are removed from the front end while maintenance is active, together with any sub-items nested under them. This covers classic menus and the Navigation block; editors who can manage menus still see everything (see FAQ for hand-written links).
- Secret preview links — issue a token-protected link that lets clients view the targeted pages during maintenance without logging in. Tokens are stored hashed, verified in constant time, and can be regenerated or revoked at any time.
- Lockout prevention — administrators always bypass the maintenance screen. Additional roles can be allowed to bypass it too.
- Two screen modes — a customizable built-in template (heading, body, logo) or an existing page reused as the maintenance screen.
- Cache-aware — maintenance and preview responses send no-cache headers and DONOTCACHEPAGE, which helps prevent caching in compatible cache plugins.
- No tracking, no external services — the plugin makes no outbound requests and collects no data.