How to turn maintenance mode on and off

1. Open your Pressy and go to WordPress in the sidebar.
2. Find Maintenance mode on the Overview tab.
3. Switch it on.

Turn it off the same way. While it is on, your Pressy shows a banner across the dashboard with a button, so you can never leave it on by accident.

Read this before you switch it on

Maintenance mode blocks everything, including wp-admin and wp-login.php. It is not a "visitors see a notice, you keep working" mode. Once it is on you cannot get into WordPress either, and the one-click sign-in button will not get you past it.

Turn it off from this dashboard screen — that is the only route back in.

The holding page cannot be edited or branded.

What to use instead

For most jobs you do not want maintenance mode at all:

• Changing a theme or testing a plugin — use staging and keep the live site up.
• A page that is not ready — set that page to draft in WordPress.
• Taking the whole site down for a while — maintenance mode is the right tool, and this is the case it is for.