Website Troubleshooting Archives

"Coming soon" What the ....so frustrating. Web issues can be so difficult to fix. The hosting provider blames the theme provider, and the theme provider blames the web manager - round and round we go. Not today! This is a problem we can fix right now. A website that states "Coming soon" means the webmaster has enabled maintenance mode. To remove maintenance mode, log into your web manager platform dashboard and turn maintenance mode off. In this post, you'll learn why your website says maintenance mode and what you can do right now to turn it off. What is Maintenance Mode? When a new website is under development, it is common practice for the web developer to place it in maintenance mode. Maintenance mode is an application on a website development dashboard that allows the web developer or webmaster (person responsible for website control) to offer visitors a temporary message. The message lets visitors know they are in the right place, but the website is currently unavailable and often lets them know why and sometimes when it will be back live. Common maintenance mode messages include: Coming soon - Commonly used for new sites that are undergoing construction but are almost complete. Under construction - Commonly used at the early stage of website development. Maintenance mode - Commonly used for, as its name suggests, maintenance, design changes, or troubleshooting a technical issue. Enabling maintenance mode then prevents visitors from accessing your web pages. It also prevents search engines such as Google from crawling your pages. Placing your website in maintenance mode for long periods will disappoint your visitors and hurt your Google web page rankings and your income if you earn money from your site. So let's look at how to turn it off, and we'll do that right now. How to Turn Maintenance Mode Off As most websites are built on a WordPress platform, the steps below to turn off maintenance mode are based on that popular platform. Other platforms, such as WIX, Godaddy, and Squarespace steps, are similar. The WordPress maintenance mode off steps are as follows: Log into your website WP dashboard (www.yourwebsitename.com/admin) Go to the Plugins tab on the left-hand panel. Locate the maintenance plugin Enter maintenance mode Toggle off maintenance mode or deactivate maintenance mode at For your changes to take effect, you will likely need to purge the cache. I turned Off Maintenance Mode, and it Still Says "Coming Soon." Don't panic; this is a common problem and easy to solve. We need to purge our website cache..... We need to what now? Here's the nontechnical answer. To speed up the internet, save resources, and improve reader experience, your phone or computer saves a copy of the web pages you've visited recently. That way, when you revisit these pages, they open super fast; the downside is it may not be the latest version of that page. Your web host provider does something very similar. Your host provider server is where your website pages are stored, and they make your pages live on the internet. To save resources and speed up the internet, your host provider doesn't update the files of your website and makes them live every time you make a change. Instead, they update several times a day. How often they update is dictated by how much you pay (more equals more) or how often you've set them to update. A site that is news-orientated will require minute-by-minute updates, but a site that has pretty static content might only require a basic daily update. And so, for our changes to take effect (in our case, removing maintenance mode) right around the world instantly, we'll need to force our host provider to update our files. That process is known as purging the cache, which we'll do now. How to Purge Cache As we make changes to our website, it is, as you know, standard practice to purge the files to check the live version and make sure they have taken place as expected. Purging the cache forces our web host to push the latest version of our website around the world instantly. To purge our web files, we have two choices: Purge from our host provider dashboard - Log into your host provider dashboard. In the website management section, you'll find a tab labeled "Purge all files." Hit purge and check your website has changed. Purge from our web developer dashboard - Log into your web builder dashboard. At the top of your dashboard, locate the tab labeled "Purge all" and hit purge. Note not all web builders will have a purge tab. It is possible to add a plugin to purge from your web builders dashboard. That's it; you succeeded. Nice work! Sum Up Coming soon on a website means the webmaster has turned maintenance mode on. This is common practice when the web developer is building a new website or when the webmaster needs to make major changes to a website, or while troubleshooting a major issue. Maintenance mode may be turned on and off on your website builder's dashboard. However, to take immediate effect, the webmaster may need to purge the website files. You may find the following posts helpful: Worth paying for a website? Passive income sites for sale Can I build my own website? How to make money from a Blog?