Maintenance mode is useful when you need to perform scheduled maintenance that requires stopping your customers from placing orders via your eCommerce site. The page selected for maintenance mode is also what customers will see if they use your website when we run database maintenance during off-peak hours.

Prerequisites

You'll need to have an eCommerce site
You'll need to have a maintenance page designed for this purpose
When creating this page, you need to consider that some components of the eCommerce may not function like normal. For example, the Product Groups plugin may not be functioning so this should not be used on your maintenance page
When you put your site into maintenance mode the system caches your page on our server which is separate from yours and is served from there

How to put your website into Maintenance Mode

Step 1: Navigate to Site Properties

To place your site into maintenance mode, you need to go to the Error Pages section. To do this go to “Home” on the ribbon bar, then “Site Properties”.

Step 2: Select Error Pages

Then, click "Error Pages".

Step 3: Set Time and Date for Maintenance Page

To trigger the maintenance page to show for a set time, input this into the 'Next Maintenance section. When the date set comes around, we will show the maintenance page for whoever tries to access your website.

This is a useful tool if you are working on some large updates to the website and don't wish for your Customers to be able to access the site.

Step 4: Out of Maintenance Mode

To take your site out of maintenance mode, simply clear the date and time in the 'Next Maintenance' field.

How to edit the Maintenance Page

You can fully customise and edit the page that shows when the site is in maintenance mode, as you can for all pages on the site. It is always recommend to include details like how to contact your Customer Services or why the Website is in maintenance mode so then Customers are aware of why they can't browser the site.

Step 1: Create the maintenance page

You will need to already have a page ready to use for maintenance mode. If you don't have this you can easily create it by navigating to the page creation. Go to the Site Map in the ribbon menu and select New Page.