Setup a Coming Soon
While launching a new site to establish your online presence, you wouldn’t like people to see blank pages when you are not ready with content and designs. Maybe you are working on your existing WordPress site to make some significant changes. This might be because you are installing new updates, plugins or themes. You might also be trying to fix an error. Things like this can’t always be avoided.
In these scenarios, you need to do things cleverly because an existing site showing errors can lose subscribers or visitors. The best idea is to setup a ‘Coming Soon’ or ‘Under Construction’ page, so that your visitors know that you are working on your website.
There are a number of methods of setting up these pages. We have curated the two easiest methods for you. First, do it in your cPanel. Second, accomplish this using the ‘Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode’ plugin for WordPress. Having said that, here is how to do it.
- Creating coming soon/under construction page using cPanel
The homepage or the first page of a website is shown to visitors according to the index page. A web hosting server looks for index page which are generally named index.html, index.htm, index.php, and default.htm. The file saved with one of these names is placed as the homepage of a website.
To show your visitors that you are working on your site, you need to create a new landing page. This can be done using cPanel. Below is the process to do it.
Step-1: Log in to your cPanel account.
Step-2: Go into the File Manager.
Step-3: Navigate to root folder of the domain and use public_html.
Step-4: Navigate to the toolbar, and click on New File option, placed in the left-hand side.
Step-5: When you click New File, you will get an option to enter the name of new file. Type the file name accordingly whether you are creating it for coming-soon page or maintenance mode.
For example, enter comingsoon.html, if it is for setting a coming-soon page.
After typing the file name, click on Create New File button to finish the file creation. A new empty file will be created.
Step-6: You have to edit the empty file according to the need. So, open this file in HTML Editor.
From HTML Editor, you can type the text you want to show on landing page. It doesn’t require any coding skills. The HTML Editor allows you to edit the text to make it visually appealing. You can keep it simple or make it fancy by choosing colors, fonts, text styles, etc.
Step-7: After designing the page in HTML Editor, click on Save button.
Now that you are ready with a new page to be shown as landing page for your site, it’s time to set this file as the default index page.
Step-8: Visit the Files category in cPanel and click on File Manager.
Step-9: Find Settings option at the top right corner and click it.
Step-10:Select the document root for the domain name you are setting the homepage for. Mark the Show Hidden Files option and click on Save.
Step-11: Find .htaccess file and click the right button on mouse. A menu will appear. Click on Edit option from the menu.
Step-12: The htaccess editor will open, where you have to paste the following code on top for configuring the required index page.
#Alternate default index page
DirectoryIndex
Following this code, enter the new file that you created in HTML Editor. For example, if you created comingsoon.html file, then the complete code will look like this.
#Alternate default index page
DirectoryIndex comingsoon.html
Step-13: Click on Save button.
The first page of your site will now show the text you had entered in HTML Editor, whether it’s Website on maintenance mode, or Website Coming Soon.
- Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode plugin
Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode plugin is the best option for you to easily and quickly set up a coming soon or maintenance mode page for your site. It is a flexible and simple plugin that works well with all WordPress plugins and themes. You get access to thousands of images to create a beautiful and SEO-friendly landing page.
While showing the desired landing page, you can continue to gain website subscribers and social media followers.
Here is how you can push the coming soon or under construction page using this plugin.
Step-1: Open the main plugin dashboard and navigate to Design.
Step-2: Design includes all the options using which you can tailor the landing page. Every aspect of the design can be customized. You can pick from numerous themes. Select one and edit it.
Choose desired images for cover, easily place the text, logo, subscriber forms, social media icons, and more. This all can be done quickly by just dragging and dropping.
It comes with around 45 content animations and options to use any YouTube video as the background to make the page visually appealing. For further enhancement, there are Instagram inspired filters which can be applied to images as well as videos.
Step-3: When you’re done with designing the page, jump to the SEO option. To help your site rank higher on search engines, it lets you choose SEO title for landing page, and define the meta description.
Step-4: Since the plugin comes integrated with MailChimp, Zapier and Autoresponder, you can push a subscriber form on the page. To link your MailChimp account, just enter the MailChimp API Key and save it.
Step-5: You can show the normal site to logged in users by whitelisting their IP addresses. Navigate to Access option, enter the IP addresses of users whom you want to whitelist, and save the changes.
Step-6: Once you are done with everything, you can see the preview of your new page by clicking the Preview Page button on bottom of the page.
If everything seems in place, go to the admin bar and enable the Coming Soon status.
Conclusion:
These are the easiest ways for you to set up a coming soon or under construction page for your site. While the process with cPanel can show a simple landing page, the Coming Soon plugin can attract the visitors even when you are working on it.
Author Bio:
Catherrine Garcia is a passionate blogger and a freelance Web Developer. She along with her group of freelance developers, are experts of creating Websites on CMS.
