Description
Veil puts a clean coming soon, under construction or maintenance mode page in front of your site while you build it or work on it, and gets out of the way the moment you launch.
- Fast. One small HTML response with inline CSS. No jQuery, no theme, no external requests, no web fonts.
- Two modes. Coming soon for sites that haven’t launched (200, hidden from search engines), or Maintenance for live sites under work (503 with Retry-After, so rankings are kept).
- Launch date. Optional countdown, and the page can switch itself off at launch.
- Your content. Logo (with an optional dark-mode version), headline, message, a call-to-action button, social, WhatsApp and phone links, footer, browser title, meta description and share-card tags.
- Three layouts. Centered, Split, and Veil: a frosted-glass card over a full-screen image, with a built-in backdrop.
- Your design. One-click presets, colors, background image with overlay, automatic dark mode, four loaders and system fonts.
- Access control. Choose which roles see the real site, share a secret preview link, allow IP addresses, and leave chosen pages open.
- Private until launch. The REST API is closed to visitors, so unpublished posts, pages and users stay private, and the login link stays hidden unless you turn it on.
- No surprises. The admin bar shows the status with a one-click switch,
wp veil on|off|statusworks from WP-CLI, and common page caches are cleared on every change.
Engineered by Datura Digital. Social icons adapted from Lucide (ISC License). The built-in backdrop image is original artwork by Datura Digital, released under the same license as the plugin.
Screenshots





Installation
- Install from the Plugins screen, or upload the
veil-coming-soon-maintenance-modefolder to/wp-content/plugins/. - Activate it.
- Go to Settings Veil, set up your page and tick “Show the page to visitors”.
FAQ
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Coming soon, under construction or maintenance mode: which one do I need?
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They differ in what search engines are told. A site that hasn’t launched yet, whether you call it coming soon or under construction, should use Coming soon mode: visitors see your page and search engines are asked not to index it. A live site that’s temporarily down for work should use Maintenance mode: it answers with 503 so search engines keep your rankings and check back later.
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I’m logged in and still see my site.
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That is intended: administrators always see the real site. Use the Preview button, or open the site in a private window.
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My visitors still see the old site.
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A server or CDN cache is serving an old copy. Veil clears LiteSpeed Cache, WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache itself; clear any other cache from your host’s panel.
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Only for people who open the secret preview link. That cookie holds a signed token, no personal data, and lasts as long as you choose under Access.
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The IP allowlist doesn’t work behind Cloudflare or a proxy.
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There the visitor’s address arrives in a header instead. Return it from the
veil_client_ipfilter.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Veil – Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
ContributorsTranslate “Veil – Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.1.0
- New: three layouts (Centered, Split and Veil) and one-click design presets.
- New: built-in Veil backdrop, used by the Veil layout until you choose an image.
- New: optional logo for dark mode, call-to-action button, WhatsApp and phone links.
- New: share-card tags (Open Graph and Twitter) for links to the page.
- New: WP-CLI commands
wp veil on,wp veil offandwp veil status. - Improved: in maintenance mode with a future launch date, Retry-After counts down to the launch.
- Fixed: “Pages left open” now works with non-Latin addresses, such as Greek slugs.
- Fixed: a wildcard such as /shop/* no longer opens sibling pages such as /shopping.
- Fixed: the countdown no longer depends on the visitor’s clock.
- Fixed: the background image now displays correctly on iOS.
1.0.0
- First release.
