Taking Store Offline for Maintenance
How do you make changes to your web store without customers seeing them? With Magento Go, you have the ability to take your store offline for maintenance; this feature is called Maintenance Mode. With maintenance mode, you can modify you can comfortably modify your web store without worrying about affecting the customer experience.
In Maintenance Mode, customers are served a temporary splash page until you return to Production Mode (when your web store is live). What’s more, maintenance mode is 503 ready. 503 Service Unavailable prevents search engines from removing your site from their index or assuming that your site no longer exists.
To Enable Maintenance Mode:
- From the Admin Panel, select System > Configuration
- Select the Maintenance Mode tab in the left side panel in the General section.
- Expand the Maintenance Mode Options bar.
- Set Enable Maintenance Mode to Yes.
- From the Maintenance Mode Page drop-down menu, select 503 Service Unavailable.
Tip: The 503 Service Unavailable page is the default template that is available when you enable maintenance mode. You also have the option of serving customers a custom splash page. To do this, create a new CMS Page and fill it in with the content you want customers to see.
- In the Whitelist field, enter the IP addresses that you want to exempt from being redirected to the maintenance mode splash page, if you would like to view your store, while working on it. Your IP address is shown below – simply fill it into the Whitelist.
- Once you’ve configured it, click [ Save Config ] to save these changes.
