It is normal to run into the most common WordPress errors and experience some downtime, but your server is even more important to track. Your WordPress server is maintained by your web host and you have no control when something goes wrong with it.

It is very likely that your server has gone down and been restored without your knowledge. This can negatively impact your website without you ever noticing, thus, it is important to be vigilant.

Today, I will demonstrate how to track your WordPress server’s uptime by using the Server Info plugin.

Why is it Important to Know Your Server Uptime?

You may be thinking, I have no control over my server, so what does it matter if I know about it or not?

The answer is simple, you are paying your web host to host your website on a server, and if they are not doing what they promised it may be time to switch. Your website may be experiencing downtime at the same time visitors are trying to access the website.

As a result, that visitor can not see your content, thus they go somewhere else.

If it happens often enough, users will simply start avoiding your site when it shows up in the search results. That is if it even shows up at all. You see, not only does downtime impact users, but it also hurts your website’s SEO.

For example, imagine your website was down for a minute, but that was the exact moment that Google was trying to examine your content. You can probably guess you are not going to get a ranking for a website that cannot be reached.

Your website’s reliability should never come into question and if your web host is not doing their job right, you should know.

Of course, keep in mind no web host is perfect and there will be some downtime at some point.

How to Track Your WordPress Server’s Uptime

Step 1: Install Server Info

The Server Info plugin is a simple tool that shows you various server and website information, which includes the amount of server uptime. All of the information is viewable elsewhere, but this plugin is convenient for placing it in one location.

If you are not happy with the amount of uptime you are seeing, contact your provider for web hosting plans or get ready to switch.

Begin by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.

Search for Server Info in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.

Scroll down until you find the Server Info plugin and click on the “Install Now” button and activate the plugin for use.

Step 2: View the Server Info

Unlike other plugins, this one works after activation. There are no settings to configure or tweak. All you can do is view the information.

On the left-hand admin panel click on Settings and select the Server Info option. This will pull up the information page.

The plugin divides the information into three easy-to-read sections called Hosting Server Information, Database, and WordPress Information. Each section simply lists the information available. so let’s cover it.

Step 3: Understand the Server Info

The Hosting Server Information provides all of the information related to your web server. This includes things like the operating system, IP address, PHP version, and other pieces of information.

The main thing that this section is useful for is for viewing your PHP version. While you should always be using the latest version, sometimes your server has not been updated, thus, you need to manually do it.

Another important aspect of this section would be the Server Uptime stat. Essentially this is a measurement of how much uptime your server gets. Since most web hosts promise 99.99% uptime, your server should realistically always be working.

If not, you need to find a new web host.

It’s worth pointing out that you can see and edit all of this information through your web hosting account.

The next section is for your Database. This shows you simple information like the name of your database, table prefix, and whatnot. This section doesn’t include much, but it may be useful to users starting out that don’t know any of this information.

You can access your website’s cPanel to access and edit your database as needed.

The final section provides information about WordPress. This includes what your active theme is, what plugins are active and inactive, the WordPress memory limit, and if debug mode is enabled.

This is a quick view of the WordPress install. You can find more detailed information in WordPress itself, but the main advantage is being able to view this information in one location. Normally you would need to go to different sections of WordPress to view this information.

And that’s really all there is to this plugin.

Congratulations, you have successfully found your server’s uptime. The plugin will actively keep track of any changes and your uptime will be reflected accurately. Of course, seeing this number does not mean you understand it.

Understanding Server Uptime In WordPress

Many people fail to see the importance of uptime. In fact, many prefer to see downtime exclusively. While downtime is also an important fact, uptime is a better indicator.

Let’s say your web host promises that your server will be up and running 99% of the time.

That sounds great – and is great, but that means there will be downtime, 1% of downtime, in this example.

Let’s do some simple math. There are 168 hours in a week. If the website has 1% of downtime in a week, that is 1.68 hours, which is almost 1 hour and 40 minutes of downtime. That doesn’t sound so bad, but let’s step it up a notch.

There are 365 days in a year (8760 hours). 1% of a year is 3.65 days (87.6 hours). Three days is a significant amount of downtime, especially if it happens during peak hours.

Think of it this way, that is 3.65 days that you are not earning anything from your website but are paying for it.

No web host can offer 100% uptime. It is just not possible. Hardware fails, natural disasters take place, power outages happen, and other variables outside their control account for downtime.

If your web host is promising 99% uptime, make sure they are delivering.

Keep Your Website Running Smoothly

Viewing the uptime of your WordPress server is just one of the many factors you should keep an eye on when running a website. You should also keep an eye on how fast your website loads, how easy it is to navigate, and other factors.

All of these create an experience for the user and you want that to be as positive as possible. If you are receiving complaints or feedback from users, take it seriously and be proactive about responding and making changes.

How satisfied are you with your web host? Were you surprised by your website server’s uptime?

The post How to Track the Server Uptime of Your WordPress Site appeared first on GreenGeeks.

Most websites will redirect visitors to a maintenance, temporary, or unavailable page to inform them that the website is down.

Running a website is a 24/7 job because there is always more work to be done. There are many things that can go wrong and force you to take a website offline. Locating these things and preventing visitors from seeing them is extremely important.

Today, I will demonstrate how to redirect visitors to a maintenance page in WordPress using the WP Maintenance Mode plugin.

Why Use a Maintenance Page

You may be wondering why someone would spend time setting up a maintenance page instead of working on a fix or prevention measures. The answer is pretty simple and should not come as a surprise. Regardless of how prepared you are, something will go wrong on your website that is out of your control.

Most of the time these mishaps are caused by staff members making simple mistakes that mess something up. This is common and will happen as your website grows. What you now need to ask yourself is whether it is better to allow visitors to view pages that have something wrong or redirect them to a maintenance page.

The general census from all major websites is that it is better to have a maintenance page. Displaying low-quality content that is full of errors makes your brand look weak and unreliable. Displaying a maintenance page makes it look like a routine checkup and lets visitors know the page will return shortly.

How to Redirect Visitors to a Maintenance Page in WordPress

Today, I will demonstrate how to redirect visitors to a maintenance page in WordPress using the WP Maintenance Mode plugin. This plugin is extremely popular with over 900,000 active installs.

The plugin is extremely straightforward to use.

After installing the plugin, activate it and your website will be in maintenance mode. Only admin accounts and others you grant permission to will be able to access the website.

Keep in mind that if you are looking to put your website into maintenance mode to test new ideas, this is not the correct way. Instead, you should be using a test server like Xampp or WAMP. A test server allows you to test and make sure the latest updates work perfectly on a copy of your website. This allows you to make significant changes without impacting your website.

Step 1: Install WP Maintenance Mode

Let’s start by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.

Search for WP Maintenance Mode in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.

Scroll down until you find the WP Maintenance Mode plugin and click on the “Install Now” button and activate the plugin for use.

On the left-hand admin panel click on Settings and select the WP Maintenance Mode option. This will pull up the main settings page.

Step 2: Configure General Settings

This plugin is pretty simple to set up and mostly consists of drop-down menus and radio buttons. Thus, you don’t need to be a tech wizard to master this tool.

The first thing you need to do is actually enable maintenance mode. It is the first option on the General tab and it is deactivated by default.

Now you should go through the various settings of the plugin to set it up the way you want.

The second option allows you to allow search engine bots to access your website while maintenance is happening. It is recommended to select “Yes” if you are an established website.

You can select which roles will have access to the front and back ends of your website. By default, Administrator accounts can access both. You can grant other user roles access as well.

Enter a redirection URL to redirect visitors without permission to another page. Make sure the URL you enter is not affected by maintenance mode. You can enter any page into the Exclude box to ensure it is not.

Step 3: Configure the Rest of the Settings

The rest of the settings consist of a lot of cosmetic and design-related settings. Thus, all of the choices are up to your preferences.

Click on the “Design” tab.

Here you can customize the maintenance page and the message on it. There are also other design options like the colors you can choose. I recommend picking colors that match your website’s color scheme. Pick the best options for your website.

Click on the “Modules” tab.

Here you can set up a countdown to when the website will be back online, add a subscribe button, display social media information, and list contact information. The clock countdown is a really good feature because it lets visitors know when to check back. Pick the best options for your website.

The other tabs allow you to manage bots and GDPR compliance. Go through them and select the best settings for your website. Once you are done, click on the “Save settings” button. Your website will now be in maintenance mode.

Congratulations, you have successfully activated maintenance mode and redirected visitors to a maintenance page. This will allow you to add new content or fix errors that were plaguing your website.

Additional Maintenance Redirect Plugins For WordPress

One thing WordPress has in spades is options. And maintenance plugins are no exception to that rule. If you want to try out another tool, there are plenty to choose from and each one has a unique feature or two.

Here are a few plugins you can use instead of WP Maintenance Mode:

Maintenance

When it comes to displaying a maintenance mode in WordPress, the Maintenance plugin is one of the best choices you can make. It offers users over 200 templates that you can use to build a maintenance page for your website.

Each template is customizable, thus, you won’t have any issue adding your own logo.

Rocket Maintenance Mode & Coming Soon Page

Another excellent alternative to consider is the Rocket Maintenance Mode & Coming Soon Page. With it, users can easily construct a coming soon page that has a fully functioning progress bar, among other things.

Overall, this plugin is easy to use, offers a lot of customization, and most importantly, it is free to use.

Set Up A Redirect to Your Maintenance Page In WordPress Today

One of the most frustrating moments a visitor will have is when their favorite website is down for maintenance. It is a good idea to announce it ahead of time, if possible. Use social media accounts to spread the word to your followers.

It is also a good policy to try and aim for maintenance during off-peak hours. Every time your website is unavailable, you are losing money. Minimize this by avoiding downtime during peak hours.

Not only does this help maximize profits, but it also helps minimize the impact on visitors.

Why do you need to use maintenance mode in WordPress? How easy do you find WP Maintenance Mode to use?

The post How to Redirect Visitors to a Maintenance Page in WordPress appeared first on GreenGeeks.

Maintenance mode for WordPress can have a lot of uses, especially if something breaks on the site. However, it can also be used as a way to advertise coming attractions.

Not all adjustments have to be done on a live website, and some may be distracting to current visitors. In this case, you would want to set your site to maintenance mode.

For example, what if you had a plugin installed that is interactive with users but it’s not working right? Perhaps there is a problem with storing data that you don’t want people to use at this very moment. It’s like people trying to get on a roller coaster that doesn’t work.

So, how do you put your site into this state so you can make your changes?

In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to set your WordPress website for maintenance mode or display a coming soon page. Whichever you prefer, it’s a simple process that can take little time to set up.

Why would you use maintenance mode or a “coming soon” page?

Setting up a maintenance mode or coming soon page can give you a chance to make modifications to a website without others seeing the work. It can also give you a chance to fix things behind the scenes.

If a plugin or other part of your site breaks down, it can be very distracting to visitors. No one likes to visit a website that seems to be broken. This could hurt your online reputation for both visitors and search engines.

Maintenance mode returns a 503 error to sites like Google informing them that the site shouldn’t be indexed at that time. That prevents problems from becoming part of your search results, which could hurt various factors for SEO.

A “coming soon” page can still be indexed by Google, which can be a good thing as your content can be in the search engine before the site is officially live. It can be a great preemptive feature for scoring well on the search results page.

Setting Up Maintenance Mode in WordPress

When it comes to setting up maintenance mode, you have quite a few options available. For this tutorial, we’re going to use the Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode by SeedProd plugin. It’s a popular platform that has a lot of useful options that we’ll go over.

To use this plugin:

Step 1: Go to “Plugins” from your WordPress admin panel on the left.

Step 2: Add a new plugin and search for Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode.

Step 3: Install and activate the plugin. It will automatically launch the settings page for the plugin once it’s activated. If you need to find this window later, it will be added to your settings area of WordPress.

Step 4: Select whether to activate “Coming Soon Mode” or the “Maintenance Mode.” Remember, these are distinctive to SEO. Maintenance mode means the site won’t be crawled at that time while coming soon will be. For now, you may want to leave it off until you’re ready to put the site into these modes.

Step 5: Place your logo image. You can use the same logo you have for your website or you can upload something new.

Step 6: Input a headline. This is optional, but many people will use the headline of their actual website or use something that briefly describes why the site is down.

Step 7 :Create a message. You’ll notice that the text field for the message uses the same editor found when creating posts and pages. This means you can add anything found in the editor. This is convenient, especially if you use the TinyMCE Advanced editor to add more functionality to creating content.

Step 8: Create the header. The header is where you place the favicon, Google Analytics code and meta information for SEO. If you want to keep optimization practices, make sure you fill this section out.

Step 9: Scroll back up to the top and click the “Design” tab.

Step 10: Set up your background. You’ll have a variety of options to customize the design of the maintenance mode or coming soon page. Colors, background images and responsive control are only a couple of these features.

Step 11: Set your content width and whether or not your text will wrap within the box. By default, this plugin will use a space of 600 pixels wide. However, you can change that by adding a number in the box. Enabling “Well” makes the text flow within the box without the need for scrolling.

Step 12: Customize your text. You have the option to change the color for text, links and headlines as well as changing the actual font.

Step 13: Input your custom CSS. If you have a specific CSS code you want to use, this plugin allows you to put it in the provided box.

Step 14: Scroll back up and click the “Advanced” tab. In this section, you can input custom scripts for the header and footer as well as place your own HTML programming. However, this is an optional feature. If you don’t know how to code for CSS or HTML, you can skip this part.

Step 15: Click the “Live Preview” tab to open a new browser window to see your maintenance mode or coming soon page.

After each section in the plugin, you can click the “Save All Changes” button.

Once these settings are in place, all you need to do is change the radio button to “Enable Coming Soon” or “Enable Maintenance Mode.” WordPress and the plugin will do the rest.

Other Maintenance Mode Plugins to Check Out

When it comes to maintenance mode, you can find a variety of plugins that may offer different functions. The hardest part is picking one perfect for your website.

Maintenance Mode

The Maintenance Mode plugin has a lot of features for both the free and premium versions. It’s SEO optimized, allows you to control the RSS feeds, includes social icons for your profiles and more. The Pro version comes with Google Fonts and custom CSS use.

Maintenance Mode And Under Construction Page

If you need a quick basic layout, Maintenance Mode And Under Construction Page plugin has quite a few interesting features. It includes things like social media links, newsletter subscriber forms, automatic launch and copyrighting functions. You can also set a countdown timer as well as import and export subscriber lists directly from the page.

WP Maintenance Mode

WP Maintenance Mode is another attractive plugin that may be worth looking into. It has a long list of fun features from excluding certain URLs on your site for maintenance, to a countdown timer and including specific social icons for your profiles. You can also set up contact forms and landing pages from this plugin.

Setting your site to maintenance mode can keep errors from being indexed by Google while giving you a chance to straighten up the website before visitors see it. Whether it’s repairing a faulty plugin or creating a new design as a surprise for your guests, setting up the maintenance mode in WordPress can have its uses.

What kind of features have you rolled out while your site was live? Have you ever had someone access a broken part of your site before you were able to fix it?

The post How to Place Your Site in Maintenance Mode within WordPress appeared first on GreenGeeks.