This is one of those blog articles you probably don’t need today but may need one day down the road. For that reason, I suggest you bookmark it in case you ever need to know how to do this.

Sometimes as bloggers and website owners there comes a need to temporarily redirect all our site visitors to a temporary maintenance page. If you’re a WordPress blogger, there is a maintenance page plugin you can use to accomplish this; however, that plugin is limited, crutched by the fact that you actually have to have your WordPress site in good working order.

But what happens if you one day find your site was hacked and some malicious asshole posts a bunch of spam or porn links on your site and your WordPress Dashboard isn’t working as it should? What if you had no access to your WordPress admin area at all?

What then?

A plugin won’t help.

So if you ever come to a point where you need to redirect everyone but yourself to a temp maintenance page, here’s how you do it through your web hosting control panel (apart from WordPress).

How To Create A Maintenance Page Redirect

Step 1

Create a simple html file and place it in your blog’s root directory. Name it something like, maintenance.html. Inside the maintenance.html file you can put anything you want. “Hi. I’m out to lunch for a few moments while the construction crew is busy at work . . .”

But why stop there? Your site is better than that. Customize the page with your site’s colors and images. Maybe add a video or your latest blog post. CSSgirl wrote some tips and shows some examples on the topic of creating a memorable maintenance page.

Step 2

Ok so now you have your maintenance.html page set up, the next step is to redirect everyone to it while you’re doing whatever it is you need to do.

Navigate to your blog’s root directory in your web hosting control panel and open your .htaccess file.

Once opened, you’re going to add this code at the top:

# Use this code to redirect visitors to maintenance.html file while upgrading
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^618\.124\.259\.25
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$
RewriteRule $ http://your-site.com/maintenance.html [R=302,L]

The yellow parts above are the areas you need to change. Visit What is my IP address? to find your IP address and put those numbers in under the first yellow highlight. Next add the url path to your own maintenance page in the second yellow part.

And that should do it. Your site should now show a maintenance page to everyone except you (your IP address was whitelisted). To see what everyone else sees, add a # sign in front of the IP line:

# RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^618\.124\.259\.25

The # comments lines out.

When you’re finished, leave the code in your .htaccess file for next time. To disable the code, just add a # in front of each line:

# Use this code to redirect visitors to maintenance.html file while upgrading
# Options +FollowSymlinks
# RewriteEngine on
# RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^618\.124\.259\.25
# RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$
# RewriteRule $ http://your-site.com/maintenance.html [R=302,L]

Remember, if you need help with upgrades or WordPress security, visit the blog services page and use the contact form there to get in touch with me.

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