Website Under Construction Pages: Five WordPress Plugins Tested on a Blank Site

An under construction page is two different jobs that look the same in a browser. If the domain is new and nothing has ever lived there, the page is a placeholder that can collect a few email addresses. If an existing site is going offline for a rebuild or a fix, the page has a second audience you never see. Google keeps crawling while you work, and what it is told decides whether your rankings are still there when you switch the site back on.

So I installed five popular WordPress plugins one at a time on a blank site, turned each one on and looked at what a logged-out visitor gets with no design work at all. I also checked the HTTP status code each one sends, because Google asks for a 503 during planned downtime and not every plugin sends one. Install counts, ratings and update dates come from WordPress.org on 7 October 2026. If your site is not on WordPress, the plain HTML route is covered after the plugins.

At a glance

SeedProd

SeedProd started in 2011 as a coming soon plugin and has since grown into a full website builder. That shows the moment you open it. The dashboard on my test site led with Coming Soon Mode and Maintenance Mode set-up buttons, then listed Website Builder, Login Page, 404 Page and Subscribers, each with a green Upgrade to Pro button beside it. A Recommended Plugins panel sat next to them offering four more installs.

The free page builder is the reason people pick it. You choose a template, drag blocks around and get something that looks designed, and the same page can later become a launch or sales page. Its two modes behave differently. Maintenance mode sends a 503 with a Retry-After of one day, while coming soon mode serves the page as a normal 200, which suits a new domain. Email signups are a Pro feature, and one reviewer in December 2025 said nearly every landing page template was Pro as well. Another, in April 2026, complained about being pushed to install partner plugins during setup. SeedProd Lite has 600,000+ active installs and a 4.9 rating from 4,699 reviews, and version 6.20.10 came out on 29 September 2026.

LightStart

LightStart is the plugin many people still know as WP Maintenance Mode. It now carries the LightStart name and comes from Themeisle, and it has been on WordPress.org since 2010.

It was the only plugin in this test that sent a 503 straight away, with a Retry-After of one hour, without me touching a setting. For an existing site that is the right default. The page itself is another matter. Before you pick one of its templates, visitors get a white screen with "Maintenance mode" and four lines of apology in a system font, which is what you see above. The free version still covers a lot. You get a countdown, a contact form, a subscribe form that exports addresses to a CSV file, URL exclusions so a page like your returns policy stays visible, and per-site settings on multisite. A June 2026 reviewer called it a way to push other Themeisle plugins, and another reviewer that month gave up on the chatbot feature after waiting on support. LightStart has 400,000+ active installs and a 4.3 rating from 874 reviews, 113 of them one star. Version 2.6.24 was released on 29 September 2026.

Under Construction

If you have ever landed on a cartoon of a frowning man at a laptop with a clock and a bookshelf behind him, you have seen this plugin. That illustration is its default page, and it is what my test site showed as soon as the plugin was switched on. Turning it on is a single checkbox, and the result looks better than most of the free defaults here.

The status code is the weak spot for live sites. I read the response headers and the plugin's code, and the free version always answers with 200 OK, adding a Retry-After header that means little without the 503. For a new domain that is harmless. For a shop or blog that already ranks, Google sees a thin page returning 200 in place of your real content. Two settings help. An automatic end date switches the page off at a set time, and you can let chosen user roles see the real site. The secret preview link sits in Pro, which one reviewer in August 2025 counted among the basic things held back. It comes from WebFactory, the same company as the Maintenance plugin below. Under Construction has 600,000+ active installs and a 4.8 rating from 1,285 reviews, and version 5.83 came out on 18 September 2026.

Maintenance

This is the most installed plugin of its kind, at over a million sites, and lately one of the most argued about.

Straight after activation it shows a night photo of snowy mountains, "Site is undergoing maintenance" in thin white type and a small padlock that opens a login form. Look at the footer. It reads "© Maintenance 2026", the plugin's own name, until you change it. The 503 code is a switch labelled for search engines and it is off by default, so my test site returned 200 until I would have gone looking. Fonts load from Bunny Fonts, which helps if you care about GDPR. The bigger issue is a redesign this summer. From mid-July to 3 October 2026 the review page filled with critical posts from long-time users saying the plugin had become harder to use and that options they relied on now sit in Pro. Maintenance has 1,000,000+ active installs and a 4.4 rating from 865 reviews, and version 4.32 was released on 16 August 2026.

CMP

On paper CMP gives away the most. Coming soon, maintenance and redirect are three separate modes, and maintenance mode sent a 503 on my test site. There is a bypass URL so a client can see the real site without an account, which the Under Construction plugin charges for. Subscribers are saved in your own database or sent to Mailchimp, MailPoet or Mailster, and there's a built-in Unsplash search for backgrounds plus WPML and Polylang support. The default page put my test site's name over a marbled teal photo with the words "Something is happening" in capitals.

Support is the worry. Of the 15 newest threads on its WordPress.org forum, only three had any reply at all, and the unanswered ones include reports that the bypass cookie isn't set and that a fresh install didn't work in either mode. One July 2026 review called the plugin abandoned, though the code does still get updates. A remote code execution flaw rated 9.1 out of 10, CVE-2025-32118, was published in April 2025 and fixed in version 4.1.15. It needed an administrator account to exploit, so stay on a current version. Another reviewer pointed out that Google Fonts load from Google's servers. CMP has 200,000+ active installs and a 4.7 rating from 327 reviews, and version 4.1.20 came out on 25 September 2026.

Plain HTML

If your site isn't on WordPress, or you're moving hosts and the old site is already gone, a single HTML file does the job. Most of the templates sold for this are old. I went through the 30 best-selling items in ThemeForest's under construction category, and only four had been updated since the start of 2025. Several of the top sellers were last touched between 2009 and 2015.

The most popular one that is still maintained is Gravity by Avanzare. It costs $14, has 4,961 sales and a 4.72 rating from 172 reviews, and was last updated on 16 November 2025. It runs on Bootstrap 3, offers 12 background styles from a YouTube video to a Ken Burns slideshow, and its subscribe form posts to Mailchimp through a PHP script, so your host needs PHP. I could not load its demo, which sits behind a browser check, so there is no screenshot here. You can see it on the Gravity item page.

A template does nothing about the status code. Upload index.html and the server sends 200. On Apache, a rewrite rule with the R=503 flag and an ErrorDocument line pointing at your page fixes it. On Nginx, return 503 with an error_page directive does the same. Allow your own IP address through so you can keep working.

What to write

Most of these pages say "sorry" and nothing else. A visitor who arrives during the downtime usually wants one of three things, which are when you'll be back, how to reach you now and whether their order or booking is affected. Answer those and the page has done its work.

For a site down for a few hours, something like this works. "We're updating the shop and will be back by 3pm UK time today. Orders already placed will ship as normal. For anything urgent, call 0114 496 0000." Change the time if the work overruns, because a page that still promises 3pm at 6pm looks abandoned.

For a new domain, say what is coming and give people a reason to leave an address. "Hartley Joinery opens online in November. We make fitted kitchens and staircases in Sheffield. Leave your email and we'll send our first project photos when the site goes live." Only add a countdown if the date is real.

For a rebuild that will take weeks, a holding page is the wrong tool. Keep the old site up, build the new one on a staging copy and swap them in a single maintenance window.

Final thoughts

For a live WordPress site going offline for a few hours or a day, LightStart is the safest free choice because it sends the 503 without being asked. SeedProd and CMP do the same once you pick maintenance mode, and Maintenance does it after one switch. Check the response with your browser's developer tools before you walk away.

For a brand-new domain, the status code matters far less. Under Construction gets a decent page up fastest, and CMP is the one to use if you want email addresses without paying, as long as you can live without answers on its forum. Pick SeedProd if the holding page will turn into a proper landing page later and you are happy to work around the upgrade prompts.

Some themes have this built in, and then you need no plugin. Our own PremiumPress themes include a maintenance mode under Settings that shows a holding page with an optional countdown, sends a 503 and lets staff keep using the site. The steps are in the PremiumPress site settings docs.

FAQ

Sources

• Google Search Central, How to deal with planned site downtime. 503 and Retry-After during downtime. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• Google Search Central, How HTTP status codes and network errors affect Google Search. 5xx slows crawling, indexed URLs eventually dropped. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• WordPress developer reference for wp_maintenance. The .maintenance file, 503 and the 10-minute limit. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• SeedProd on WordPress.org and its reviews. Installs, rating, version, update date, reviewer complaints. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• LightStart on WordPress.org and its reviews. Installs, rating, features, update date. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• Under Construction on WordPress.org and its reviews. Installs, rating, options, update date. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• Maintenance on WordPress.org and its reviews. Installs, rating, update date, redesign complaints. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• CMP on WordPress.org, its support forum and reviews. Installs, rating, unanswered threads. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• CVE-2025-32118. CMP file upload flaw, fixed in 4.1.15. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• Apache mod_rewrite flags and Nginx rewrite module. Returning 503 from the server. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• PremiumPress docs, site settings. Built-in maintenance mode. Checked on 7 October 2026.
• Status codes and default pages come from my own test installs of each plugin on a blank WordPress site, 7 October 2026.