I was using ‘Site Offline or Coming Soon’ which is a really basic plugin that allows you to use your own .html for the offline message, however it was blocking the cron job for my back up software “BackUpBuddy” – It’s obviously really important to be able to backup while you are in development!

I’ve tested a bunch of other similar plugins but this was the only one I found where you could add exceptions via a list of single IP addresses (not just a range). My backup software needs to be able to ping my website’s server to trigger each step of the backup process so I needed to white list the server IP. Anyway it was easy to add the exceptions and it worked without a hitch!

I like to have a completely custom message via my own html. I’m sure I could do this with some code in the .htaccess file but it’s really convenient to be able to switch maintenance ON + OFF directly in the WordPress Admin.

You also get a nice little padlock icon in the Admin bar which is a great reminder as to whether the site is public or not.

Great plugin – really well thought out. Many thanks!