Have you ever come across a coming soon page that tells you exactly when the website will be launched? Or maybe visited a website that’s in maintenance mode?
In this article, I’ll show you how easy it is to create an under-construction page that’ll help you build an email list, gain social media followers, and rank better in WordPress.
Why Do You Need an Under Construction Page?
Most common reason to set up an under-construction page is when you’re building your website and it’s not ready for the public to access. Yet again, why? Why even bother setting it up when it’s not ready?
I could think of a couple of reasons.
First, it helps you validate your idea.
You could add a subscription form on the page. It helps your user to get notified when your site is ready. And it helps you to build an email list even when you have nothing to offer.
If you’re a product maker and planning to launch your own product, you must have heard of Product Hunt. If not, go ahead and check it out.
What I like from Product Hunt, is you could create your own upcoming page and start collecting email subscribers or even link them to your social media.
Below is an example of how the page would look like. Click here to make your own upcoming page on Product Hunt.
Lots of people afraid to build an email list before their site is ready or even when their site is ready simply because there’s not enough content. This changes the whole mindset of list building.
Build it early even when your site isn’t ready.
Second, you could build your social following early.
Add links to your social media account on the page and post regular updates of your site. As you interact, ask them for feedback. People want others to succeed. Believe or not, you’ll get valuable input early from your loyal followers.
If you want to know more of benefits of an under-construction page and what makes it very effective, check out this definitive guide to a coming soon page article.
You might wonder, what if you already have a website? What’s in it for you?
Well, how many times you need to perform maintenance tasks on your site? Depending on the size of your site, these tasks could go from minutes to hours. And when these tasks are underway, it’ll affect users browsing experience greatly. It might even cause a loss of data if not done properly.
In this scenario, you could put up a temporary under construction page to inform your users that maintenance work is underway so you could visit the site when it’s done. Easy?
How to Create an Under Construction Page in Less Than 5 Minutes
In this tutorial, we’ll use Under Construction plugin by WebFactory to create an Under Construction page. At times of writing, there’re over 300k active installations.
With this plugin, you could also create a Coming Soon page or a Landing page. Or if you have an existing website, you could also set a Maintenance Mode that’ll restrict access to your site temporarily.
While there’re few other alternative plugins available, “Under Construction” plugin is the one I recommend to our readers due to its ease of use and free themes — that actually looks beautiful.
Install the Plugin
To get started, go to Plugins > Add New and find “Under Construction” plugin. Install and activate the plugin.
Putting your site under construction is as easy as pushing a button — literally — simply click “Under Construction Mode” toggle button to turn it on.
The plugin uses the default settings and design and displays a nice looking under construction page — even without any customization yet.
Now your website isn’t accessible till you turned it off. But we’re not done yet.
Customize Your Page Design
Next, let’s customize ours Under Construction page.
Click on the “Design” tab and choose any free theme available. What I like about this plugin is the developers will add new free images so you have more design options to choose from.
Unfortunately, the free version doesn’t allow you to upload your own image, but you could insert custom CSS to adjust the page as you need with a bit of HTML skill.
The PRO version comes with drag & drop builder, over 100 templates to choose from and the feature to search for free stock photo images.
While the default page looks good, chances are there are tons of other under construction pages that look exactly like yours — you definitely want to avoid that.
I always recommend picking a design that relates to your website and design style.
Update Your Content
Next, it’s time to update your content. What makes creating under construction or coming soon page effective is if you delivered the right message to your audience.
Click on the “Content” tab to set your page title and description.
It’s important to write a highly compelling page title and description that will boost your ranking and click-through rate. Shopify published a great article on how to write meta description that will drive traffic.
Set Who Could Access Your Website
This is probably the most important section of the settings — the access tab. By default, all administrators would have access to bypass the under-construction page and view the website like how your visitors would see it.
What if you’ve hired writers to write content for your site while you’re getting everything else ready? With this plugin, you could do just that ~ and more.
On this tab, you could whitelist user based on its role — author, editor or you could even whitelist based on their username.
Time to launch and Track your Success
Now that you’ve everything set up, you could turn off the plugin and launch your site.
Better yet, if you have a set a launch date in minds beforehand, you could turn on the “Automatic End Date & Time” option on the “Main tab.
This option lets you worry less on your launch date and focus more on building your site.
More Features with the PRO version
So far, we’ve managed to set up our under-construction page easily with the FREE version, but what could you do with PRO version. With the PRO version, you could have drag-and-drop feature, access to over 1,000,000 free stock photos, and many more.
Final Thoughts
Creating an under construction page or coming soon page for your website has never been easier thanks to the awesome free plugin such as Under Construction plugin.
If you’re planning to launch a new website or thinking of doing any maintenance work on your website, it’s best to put up a page to inform your visitors something is underway.
