Ideally, you launch your website when it's completely ready. When your website is still under development, you can enable coming soon mode to let your visitors know that your website is not ready to operate.
If you use Elementor to build your website, you don't need to install an extra plugin to enable coming soon mode on your website since Elementor comes with a built-in feature to do so.
The feature is accessible on both the free version and the pro version of Elementor. In this post, I will show you how to use it.
Before you start to use the feature to enable coming soon mode on your website, let's first find out what happens when you enable coming soon mode on your website.
Shortcuts ⤵️
- What happens when your site is in coming soon mode?
- Steps to enable coming soon mode in Elementor
- Pro tips
- Summary
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What Happens When Your Site is In Coming Soon Mode?
When you enable coming soon mode on your website, you want to let your visitors know that your website is not ready to operate yet while it is accessible.
In this case, the visitors are not only humans but also search engines' bot (e.g., Google crawler).
When a website is in a coming soon mode and a search engine bot visits it, it will be served with a 200 HTTP response. This response tells the search engine that the website is ready to be indexed.
When enabling the coming soon mode, you can display the email opt-in form on the coming soon page to collect email addresses of your visitors so that you can notify them via emails once your website is ready.
When Should You Enable Coming Soon Mode?
In Elementor, you can either enable the coming soon mode or maintenance mode to let your visitors know that your website is not ready at the moment.
For a brand-new website, the right mode you can enable is the coming soon mode.
You can enable the maintenance mode if your website has been running and you want to temporarily close your website for a certain reason. Such as taking holidays, making drastic changes (e.g., design overhaul), etc.
If you enable coming soon mode while your website has been running, it can hurt your SEO. Search engines may interpret the 200 response as the new homepage content of your website.
Also, other URLs on your website could be de-indexed. If this happens, it may take time for search engines to re-crawl and restore your rankings.
Enabling Coming Soon Mode in Elementor
As I said above, you can enable coming soon mode in Elementor whether you are on Elementor Free or Elementor Pro.
Here are the steps to enable coming soon mode in Elementor.
Step 1: Create a New Coming Soon Template
Before you can enable the coming soon mode in Elementor, you first need to create a template to display the message you want to say to your visitors when they visit your website.
On your template, you can add any widgets/elements according to your goal.
To create a new template for the coming soon mode, first, go to Elementor -> Editor -> Templates on your WordPress dashboard.
On the Saved Templates screen, you can click the Add New Template button to add a new template. Give your template a name and click the Edit with Elementor button. This will open the Elementor editor where you can edit your template.
In the Elementor editor, you add any element you want. Once you are done editing the template, you can click the Publish button to publish it.
If you are completely new to Elementor and are not familiar with its editor, you can use it offline to familiarize yourself with its editor.
Step 2: Enable Coming Soon Mode from the Tools Screen
Once your template is ready, the next step is to use it on your coming soon mode.
To start enabling the coming soon mode, you can go to Elementor -> Editor -> Tools on your WordPress dashboard.
On the Tools screen, you can open the Maintenance Mode tab and choose the Coming Soon option on the Choose Mode dropdown.
Select the template you have just created from the Choose Template dropdown and end by clicking the Save Changes button.
Before clicking the Save Changes button, you can also set who can access your website while it is on the coming soon mode.
By default, all users on your website can access your website during the coming soon mode if they are logging in while accessing your website.
If you want to prevent users with certain roles from accessing your website during this mode, you can click select the Custom option on Who Can Access dropdown and then select the user roles you want to give access.
Pro Tips When Enabling Coming Soon Mode
While the main goal of enabling the coming soon mode is to let your visitors know that your website is not currently ready to operate yet, you can also use it as a marketing tool.
For instance, you can add the email opt-in form to your coming soon template to capture early interest from your potential customers.
You can connect the form to an email marketing platform like Kit or MailerLite. Or you can also use Elementor built-in form submission manager feature to manage the collected leads.
Alternatively, if you are not on Elementor Pro, you can display the social media icons and link each icon to the social media profile of your business to make it easy for your potential customers to follow it.
Summary
It takes time to create a new website with Elementor. Especially if you start everything from scratch. To let your visitors know that your website is not ready yet, you can enable the coming soon mode.
Elementor has a built-in feature to enable the coming soon mode on your website so that installing a new plugin is not necessary. The feature is accessible on both the free version and pro version.
You can enable coming soon mode in Elementor in two core steps. First, you can create a template to display a message about your site status. Second, you can enable the coming soon mode from the Tools screen.