MAINTENANCE PAGE

Nobody likes an unavailable website, but if you must take your site offline, a clear and well-designed coming soon / maintenance page can turn around a bad experience. A Coming Soon page shows the status of your websites home page, to inform your visitors that you are working on your website, updating or fixing problems.

As for your purchased Realty2Go website, until you have finished uploading property listings, pages and blog content, it is a good practice to show your website in “Coming Soon / Maintenance” mode, so that visitors will know that you are working on it and your site’s content will be online soon. In this mode, your visitors are not able to see your site’s content, they will only see the maintenance information page. The ‘Coming Soon / Maintenance mode’ allows you to display a user-friendly notice to your visitors.

With all of our Realty2Go websites, we offer two versions of Coming Soon / Maintenance pages. The basic version is based on showing a single Coming Soon page. This version is free of charge and will be activated on request. The paid version has several pages, which also shows the Real Estate services you are providing, your team of agents, about us page and contact page. For more details please visit the ‘Website Application Add-On’ section.

If you have to take your site offline for planned maintenance, we recommend properly announcing ahead of time in your Real Estate blog:

• Why will your site be offline for maintenance
• What will you do on your site during the maintenance time
• What would be the estimated offline time

WHAT IS A MAINTENANCE PAGE?

The point of using a maintenance page is to let visitors know that your site is still around and that the maintenance is only temporary. In most cases, maintenance requires taking your site offline for at least a few minutes. When a site is in maintenance mode it isn’t really shut down. It is just made unavailable to the general public, while your visitors will see a notice that the site is down for maintenance. A custom-designed maintenance page serves more as a temporary landing page that gives more information about how to get in contact with your business while the website is temporarily not available.

Remember when you bought your first shiny new car. To protect and keep it in perfect running order you had to take it in for regular maintenance inspection. Just like your car, your website also needs regular maintenance. There are usually two main instances where your website would need to display the maintenance page to the public:

• PLANNED MAINTENANCE: The maintenance page is activated and used when your website is taken down to do planned server-level or website changes and updates. It’s an effective gateway to tell users how to continue to do business until the site is back in full working order.
• UNPLANNED OUTAGES: The other scenario where a maintenance page is used is for unplanned outages. Most modern websites contain thousands of lines of code and hackers often discover vulnerabilities in code and will attempt to take advantage of this. You can help prevent this by keeping your web hosting server’s software, and your website’s software updated with the latest patches and security releases. In the event that your website does get hacked, even with all the security measures in place, you will need to remove the virus, clean up the website and restore the data. In this case, a maintenance page is a great way to avoid confusion, and give your customers clear guidelines until the site comes back online.

REALTY2GO CUSTOM DESIGNED MAINTENANCE PAGE

For announcing scheduled maintenance on your website, we offer a custom-designed maintenance page, which includes your own websites logo, a background image, video or slideshow, description text, services, about us and contact details. Also, you will be able to set the Status Code 503 on/off, to inform search engines that your site is temporarily unavailable. For more details visit the Maintenance Add-On page. If you take down your website temporarily, you must inform also search engines. This is done by utilizing the HTTP status code: 503 Service Unavailable. This informs the search engines that the server is temporarily unavailable.