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How to create outstanding maintenance page

Site developers sooner or later face the need to enable maintenance mode. When a site visitor tries to go to a page of a website under maintenance, he will see information that preventive work is being carried out. This is the service mode. The site is completely closed from visitors and is available only for correcting technical issues. Thus, the programmer or layout designer can safely change the content of the page, fully making sure that no one can interfere with this process.

Website maintenance is a process of constantly filling it, updating information and improving functionality. It includes a set of measures aimed at the permanent performance of the site and displaying relevant information on it. When carrying out maintenance of the site, do not forget about the customers, who often perceive this news negatively.

If, when making changes, you do not close the site using this mode, and at this time there are many visitors on it, there may be an excessive load on the hosting server (there are limits) and your blog or site will be disconnected or asked to urgently take measures to remove the load. It's good if you know how to create a service page at that time.

You definitely need a site in maintenance mode. This page will tell visitors what is happening, provide a rough timetable for when maintenance will be performed, and suggest other links to visit. The maintenance page leaves a positive impression from your site.

Let’s consider several arguments in favor of why you need a maintenance page:

  • To increase customer satisfaction.
  • To reduce costs and improve the efficiency of your site, which is offline.
  • To expand your business community and strengthen the connection between your company and customers.

It is important to ensure continuity of service so that customers receive the same level of service even if your website is under maintenance. Statistics show that 82% of buyers stopped working with companies precisely because of poor service. On the other hand, by providing your customers with quality service, you are also investing in the future, because, on average, 1 satisfied customer shares his experience with 9 closest acquaintances. So let's take a look at how to create a maintenance page and some tips to heed.

The importance of website maintenance

Website maintenance is a set of measures taken to ensure its continuous and high-quality work. Professional maintenance of a web resource can be permanent or periodic. It is carried out by qualified specialists. The importance of timely maintenance cannot be overstated. It is no less important than information. If you own a website, the first thing you need to worry about is how to maintain it on time and how to create a maintenance page.

Choosing the right plugin

Creating a maintenance page is easy with the Maintenance Mode plugin. Your favorite visitors will always be aware that the site is currently undergoing renovation work. The plugin developers tried their best and provided it with mini-templates, in the admin panel they provided functionality for changing the text, attaching your logo and adding your own CSS styles.

Set the previous site crawl frequency

Let Google choose the optimal crawl rate yourself, or set the high value manually. If your site has been unavailable for a long time, crawls may occur more frequently than usual.

User action plan

Don't let users get confused when they visit your website under maintenance. You have to think over the navigation to the smallest detail, that is, how your visitor will move along the page, what he should pay attention to and how he will use the feedback. You have to put yourself in your customer's shoes and imagine how they will or should behave on the maintenance page.

Take care of your site in the search systems

If you want search systems to see your site while it is in maintenance mode, you must enable the corresponding option. If you think through this point, your visitors can easily find your site.

Share with your website visitors

Before you publish an update, you need to test it. If everything is in order, then the message that the site is under reconstruction will be seen by all visitors not related to the admin staff. Communication with clients during the reconstruction of your site is the key to promoting your business.

Describe the problem to your customers

Customers don't like to wait. According to statistics, 57% of users expect to receive timely information from the support service during maintenance, just like on any other day. Communicate with your site visitors, provide them with complete information about what is happening on your site. To do this, there are plugins that display a list of work performed on it, explaining why your site is closed for maintenance.

Satisfied customers will make purchases from you without looking for an alternative, while an unsatisfied audience will be in search of a better option. A company with an army of satisfied customers outperforms its competitors by 16% because it has clear advantages. Where the audience is satisfied, there are constant sales.

Attractive design and strengthening of your brand

It is imperative to fully customize the visuals of the page to create a positive experience. Use colors, play with shades to support the brand during the maintenance period. Don't let your visitors forget about you with the color scheme.

Use social media more actively

It's also important to add feedback and enable social media displays to make sure your customers are using all the ways to communicate with them.

Countdown function

To enable users to find out about the resumption of the site as soon as possible, you can place a subscription form on the maintenance page. A corresponding message will immediately be sent to the e-mail of the user specified in this form after resuming the work of the site. Instead of a subscription form, you can place a special counter on the stub page for pre-planned site updates. If you know when the service ends, you can add a countdown clock to the page to encourage visitors to return.

Make your customer relationships the most trusting

All of you have heard that you need to please your target customers in every possible way. This good habit can have the most beneficial effect on your business, but too good an attitude shouldn't be overused either. Remember that there are many effective ways to build trust. Submit site maintenance alerts a few days in advance of this process so that users know the site will be down for a specified period on a specified day. When it comes to online banking, for example, people usually like to know ahead of time when they won't be able to access a website so they can schedule it. Sometimes the service takes longer than expected, in which case it is advisable to update the information on the service page to keep people informed.

Do not forget to display the news subscription form, where users can enter their email address to receive updates. You can later export this subscriber list and import it into the mailing list. Satisfaction with ongoing information, especially during site maintenance, contributes to customer retention. Customer retention is closely related to loyalty. A satisfied client will come to you again and again, it is more likely that he will do it for a long time, and will also become your advocate and a magnet for new clients.

Poor customer service and ignorance of customers about your website under maintenance can really harm your company. But by increasing the level of service, you can build loyal customer relationships, reduce customer churn, increase the number of referrals and develop your own business as quickly as possible.

A properly designed service page will help to retain regular visitors and not scare away new ones, and, which is very important, will help the site to be indexed and ranked correctly by search systems.

Outstanding Maintenance Page