Let's face it, sometimes there are just times when you need to hide your beautiful Oxygen Builder designed WordPress site away from public view for a short period of time, and this is commonly done through a coming soon or maintenance mode page. In this guide, we'll explore why you'd want to create a maintenance mode page or coming soon page in WordPress and how you can easily create them using Oxygen Builder in under 5 minutes.
It's important to say that whilst both coming soon and maintenance pages work and can be created in similar ways, maintenance pages and coming soon pages have different uses. This post will discuss why you might want to use maintenance or coming soon pages, how you can easily create one for your Oxygen Builder powered site, and how you can easily use a coming soon page to capture leads. Let's get started!
You'd use a maintenance page to prevent your visitors from coming across errors you are trying to fix or partially created pages whilst you are making tweaks to your designs if you aren't using a development environment or staging website. Many people create a maintenance page as part of their initial site design so that this can easily be activated if there are some temporary bugs to fix.
You'd use a coming soon page when you've registered a domain name but haven't yet built your fantastic WordPress website. What's more, many people say that creating a strong, SEO optimised coming soon page should be one of the first things you do in the planning stage of your website. This is for several reasons:
There are many plugins in the WordPress ecosystem that promise to create coming soon and maintenance pages, however, if you are using Oxygen Builder, you'll find that most of these plugins don't work. This is because Oxygen works by disabling the standard WordPress theme system, meaning that many of these plugins, which rely on the theme system, won't work.
So, this leaves Oxygen Builder users with two main options.
One of the common ways of creating a coming soon or maintenance page in Oxygen Bulder is to add a new full viewport div to your homepage and design your coming soon or maintenance page within this div. You then use the conditional display features within Oxygen to hide the main part of the page from logged-in users and also hide the coming soon or maintenance mode section from logged-in users. You can find a full video tutorial on how to do this on the Oxygen Builder website.
But many people find this takes time (the tutorial video itself takes 17 minutes to watch) and web developers often find this approach can confuse clients. In addition, while this works well on your homepage, it doesn't always protect your visitors from accessing other pages if they have the direct URL.
So is there a quicker, more reliable and easier way to create great-looking coming soon and maintenance pages using Oxygen builder?
This is where OxyPowerPack, a great set of additional elements and tools for Oxygen Builder, comes in. Thanks to OxyPowerPack's powerful maintenance mode tool, you can easily create maintenance or coming soon pages in WordPress in under 5 minutes. So let's explore how to make your own custom coming soon or maintenance mode page using OxyPowerPack.
First, if you don't already have OxyPowerPack, head over to the OxyPowerPack website to see the plethora of features it offers and to purchase a license. Just like Oxygen Builder itself, OxyPowerPack licenses are super affordable and are lifetime licenses, enabling you to use OxyPowerPack's power suite of features on all your/your clients' sites.
Once you've installed OxyPowerPack, you first need to create a new WordPress page. Give the page a title, but don't add more content before saving. Once saved, scroll down to the Oxygen page settings panel and choose the template you wish your maintenance or coming soon page to be rendered using. In most cases, you'll want to select 'None' to ensure that no header, footer or menus from your main site design appear on your maintenance or coming soon page. Save the page again, and then click 'Edit with Oxygen' to load the Oxygen editor in the usual way.
Once the Oxygen editor has loaded, it's time to design your coming soon or maintenance page. Whilst you can design a page from scratch, OxyPowerPack comes with a great pack of time-saving design sets for you to use- including 2 great coming soon and maintenance mode templates.
To find them, head to the 'Library' section in the Oxygen editor, then click on 'Design Sets' and then 'OxyPowerPack Designs'. Hover over the pages section to see the different page designs that are included with OxyPowerPack. To use one of the designs, just click it, and it'll be added to your page.
(To find out more information about the design sets included in OxyPowerPack check out this knowledge base article)
Then make any tweaks you want to the design before saving the page and exiting to WP Admin.
To enable your maintenance or coming soon page, you need to head to the OxyPowerPack settings, which you'll find on your admin menu.
This will load the OxyPowerPack settings page. Scroll down to find the 'Maintenance Mode' section, which has a multitude of options to enable you to fully customise the behaviour of your maintenance mode or coming soon page.
Use the drop-downs on the right-hand side of the screen to select the page you want to show as your maintenance or coming soon page for each user type. By default, any logged in user will not see the maintenance mode page. This is usually the best option for most sites- however, if you have subscribers or users with accounts, then make sure you select the maintenance page in the 'subscriber' drop down.
Finally, to enable your maintenance or coming soon page, click on the slider next to 'Maintenance Adcitivated' and then click 'save settings' on the right-hand side of the page. This will then activate your maintenance or coming soon page according to the conditions you have set.
On the OxyPowerPack Maintenance Mode settings page, you'll also see a 'Bypass Code' and 'bypass URL'. This is a great, time-saving feature for when you want to allow clients or anyone else to see your draft site, design changes or maintenance updates before making the site live to all. Just give your client the bypass URL and the bypass code, and they'll be able to view the website as if the maintenance mode had been deactivated. Their access lasts for 24 hours, and you can remove access by changing the bypass code at any time.
OxyPowerPack's maintenance mode feature is versatile, as it gives two different display modes. You can choose between these two modes in the settings of OxyPowerPack
'Replace the page content' is best for new sites where you have content or keywords on your coming soon page that you'd like search engines to begin to index.
'Redirect to maintenance page' works by a 302 redirect, so it's best for situations where you are putting a site into maintenance mode for a short period, or you have a new site, and you don't want search engines to index your coming soon page.
While you can use the default library designs to get your coming soon or maintenance page up and running in a matter of minutes, you can also use the powerful features of both Oxygen Builder and OxyPowerPack to create a custom coming soon or maintenance page, which allows you to capture leads- or do pretty much anything else for that matter.
What's more, OxyPowerPack also contains the PowerForms tool, which allows you to easily create forms within Oxygen Builder for WordPress without using an additional plug-in, meaning it will take a matter of minutes to create a custom lead capturing coming soon page for your WordPress site.
Here's how to easily customise your coming soon or maintenance page to match your brand AND capture leads in just 12 simple steps.
1. First, load a design from the OxyPowerPack library (or, of course, you can start afresh with a blank slate)
2. Now, let's change the colours to match our brand; first, select the div and change the colour to match your brand by going into 'Advanced' and 'Background'.
3. Next, select the logo on the template, and replace it with your own logo.
4. Then, select the section and change the background image to one to match your brand by going into 'Advanced' and 'Background' and selecting a new image from your media library.
5. Next, let's begin to add a form to capture the email addresses of visitors to our coming soon page.
6. First, add in a new div within the main div. To do this, add a new div from the Oxygen Menu. For this design, we want the form to take up the full width of the main div, so set the width of the div to 100%.
7. Then, we need to add in our form using the PowerForm tool within OxyPowerPack. To do this, select OxyPowerPack in the Oxygen menu and select 'PowerForm'
8. From the pop up that appears, you can start to build your form from scratch or use one of the template designs.
9. If you've selected one of the template designs, you can then edit the design to match your brand and visual identity. We'll start by changing the background of the left div of the form to a brand colour by selecting the div and going into additional options and background.
10. Then we can do the same for the right div.
11. To change the colour of the submit button in PowerFroms in OxyPowerPack, select the button and navigate to 'input field' --> 'background' --> 'background color' and select a colour to match your brand.
12. Then save your page.
Congratulations! you've created a custom coming soon page with lead capture in Oxygen Builder in under 5 minutes!
To find out more about the powerful functionality of PowerForms in OxyPowerPack, including how to change the action once a user has submitted your form, check out the PowerForms knowledge base article.
Maintenance and coming soon pages can both be useful and have their own specific uses, and luckily these can be created with ease within Oxygen Builder.
You can either create these pages using the more complicated conditional display within Oxygen Builder or take the easy and super-speedy route and use OxyPowerPack for Oxygen Builder to create your coming soon or maintenance mode page in under 5 minutes. What's more, you can easily use PowerForms in OxyPowerPack to turn your coming soon or maintenance page into a lead-generating opportunity.
Do you have any questions about how to create a custom coming soon or maintenance mode page for your Oxygen Builder powered WordPress site? Let us know in the comments section below!
