On several occasions, you need to execute the maintenance activities on your live sites. When the site is not launched to the public, you don’t face any problems in maintenance. But, after the site becomes popular and receives huge traffic, managing it becomes difficult. Therefore, the best solution available is to disable or turn off the WordPress site temporarily. In this article, we have discussed various methods by which you can make your site unavailable temporarily or permanently.
Disable WordPress Site
There are various methods about how to disable WordPress site temporarily. The method that is followed by majority of webmasters is by using WordPress plugins. There are tremendous numbers of plugins that allow you to temporarily disable your WordPress site so that you can execute the maintenance activities properly.
Although there are many tools to disable a WordPress site temporarily, it is recommendable that you should choose an effective plugin for your site. One of the most popular plugins for disabling sites temporarily is Disable Site plugin. You can install and activate this plugin like any standard plugin on your WordPress site. Upon activation, you can customize and use this plugin efficiently to disable your site.
However, if you want to use any other plugin, you should make sure that the plugin provides several features.
- To start with, the plugin should disable the front-end of your website and display a custom message to the visitors without compromising with the performance of the back-end.
- Secondly, the plugin should not be complex; you must be allowed to enable or disable your site with just one click.
- Thirdly, the plugin should help you configure and create a customized page that can be displayed successfully to the visitors while your site is temporarily disabled.
If you don’t want to use any plugin, you can restrict the visitors from entering your site by an alternate method. In this method, you need to password protect some areas of your site so that visitors cannot enter the site temporarily. This method is preferable when you need to manage a particular section of your website, and not the entire website.
Turn Your Site into Maintenance Mode
This is an alternative to the disable site plugin. Here, you can use a plugin from the list of available options that turns your site from live to maintenance mode. These plugins offer a bit more to your visitors rather than just a “Coming Soon” message.
You can customize a message along with a predicted time of switching your site back to live. Therefore, the visitors can be informed that the site in under maintenance and that they can come back after a specific period. You can use these tools by simply configuring them from the admin panel after activation.
Hence, you can choose any of the popular and effective maintenance mode plugins such as WP Maintenance Mode and Maintenance Mode Plugin to temporarily disable your site and provide a custom message to the visitors for the inconvenience.
Delete Your WordPress site
Situations may arise when you feel like the best option available for you is to permanently delete your WordPress site. This mainly happens when your site gets affected by so many malicious sources that recovery to the proper state becomes impossible. Another situation when you decide to delete your site is when you mess up the majority of elements in your site. Whatever is the reason, you should implement the following steps if you want to delete your site permanently.
To begin with, you need to navigate to your WordPress site and log in, probably for the last time. You can find the Dashboard at the top of your screen. You should click on this option and dig into the Tools menu in the next screen.
Here, you can find a “Delete Site” option. Simply click on it and proceed to the last step. A box with several options can appear for the customizations. Among the list, there is an option that says to delete your site URL and content permanently. You need to choose this option and mark the “If you are sure” box. You can now delete your site by clicking the “Delete My Blog Permanently” button.
It should be noted that all the content and details presented in your WordPress site can be deleted as soon as you complete the above-mentioned procedure. Therefore, before deleing your site, you should ensure that you do not require your WordPress content in the future.
Summary
You should choose the most appropriate method to disable your website depending upon the need for turning it off. For instance, if you want to disable your site for executing maintenance tasks, you should use the second method and turn your site into maintenance mode. Similarly, if you just want to get rid of your WordPress site permanently, you must use the last method.
Overall, it is imperative enough to use a suitable method to disable your site. Therefore, you should choose from the discussed methods appropriately and implement it on your WordPress site effectively to turn it off.