This is because of the WordPress’s wp_die() function that this plugin uses has pre-set markup which cannot be changed. This means – whatever code, headers etc. you have in your template are not there whilst in maintenance mode. This means, in your case that the google tracking code has been removed from the markup (whiles in maintenance mode) and so your site responded as unreachable.
I find your rating unfair and unreasonable. I’m not saying you should rate it 5 stars, that’s really up to you, but bearing in mind all other aspects of the plugin and my maintenance of it, I wouldn’t say it’s worth just one star.
That said I appreciate your rating, even the one star and I hope my explanation helps you understand what has happened in your particular case. I would appreciate and recommend in the future to try solve your problem using support forums or support form on plugin’s website before making any judgments.
Thank you!
Lukas
I understand your frustration with my rating. Could you please then confirm if this plugin is active would the site be seen as unreachable by search engines?
I didn’t have any Google tracking codes on my site. Or any other tracking codes. I wanted to use this plugin to display a simple “coming soon” page while i worked on my website.
After installing this plugin, i received multiple notices of my website being down from an external monitor (uptimerobot.com). My site was also seen as unreachable when fetched in Google Webmaster Tools.
My 1 star rating was because you don’t mention that this plugin makes a site essentially invisible to bots and search engines. This might not be an issue if used for a brief maintenance period, but if used as a coming soon page like i did, then this plugin could prevent a site from being indexed.
I felt it’s only fair to warn people of this as not everyone setting up a new site would have its uptime monitored. And if it wasn’t for this monitoring i wouldn’t have been aware of the problem.
I hope you can provide a warning for future users, as making a site unreachable to search engines doesn’t make for a suitable coming soon page.
Perhaps just removing the “coming soon page” wording from the plugin description will suffice? The plugin is great for quick maintenance work, when downtime is short enough to not impact crawling.
Right,
This should be resolved in 2.2
I have added new setting in advanced settings section where you can set whether you want plugin to behave as maintenance mode or coming soon page.
This is something I completely missed and never thought of as no one really brought this up until now.
Apologies @martychc23 for my previous message but I didn’t really understand what’s happening.
This should be now resolved. Please let me know if you have any problems
Lukas
I still don’t think it deserves a one star rating for what is, essentially, a support issue which looks like it’s been resolved.
Thanks @mandalareopens,
I’m hoping that @martychc23 would be so kind and could amend the rating.
Thanks a lot!
Lukas
Can you confirm that this plugin does not make a website invisible to search engines when placed in maintenance mode?
Yeah, since your last post, I have added an option in advanced settings where you can enable “coming soon page” mode, which sets the response code to 200 instead of 503.
Hope that helps,
Lukas
I have updated my review. I added a new review above the old as i’m not actually using this plugin right now. Hope this is ok as is?
Thank you @martychc23 !
If you do in the future, I hope it will be handy and useful without any flaws!
Lukas
