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Divi 5 Coming Soon Page: Use the Right 200 or 503 Status

by | Aug 30, 2026

Hiding an unfinished Divi site sounds simple until you think about search engines. Show the wrong page with the wrong status code and you either index a placeholder forever or teach Google your site is broken. This guide walks through building a coming soon page in Divi 5 and serving it with the correct HTTP status, using the Site Visibility extension in Divi Torque Pro.

Step 1: Decide between Coming Soon (200) and Maintenance (503)

The two modes look similar to visitors but say opposite things to search engines.

  • Coming Soon serves your holding page with HTTP 200. The page is a real, indexable page. Use it before a launch, so your teaser can start collecting rankings while you build.
  • Maintenance serves HTTP 503 with a Retry-After header. That is the status the HTTP spec reserves for temporary downtime. Crawlers back off and try again later instead of indexing your holding page or dropping your URLs.

The rule of thumb: launching a new site, pick Coming Soon. Taking a live site down briefly, pick Maintenance. A 503 that lasts weeks will eventually reduce crawling, so for a long rebuild prefer Coming Soon with a useful teaser.

Step 2: Design the holding page in Divi 5

The holding page is a normal published WordPress page. Create it, open the Divi 5 builder, and design it like any other page: your logo, a short message, your brand colors. Because it renders through its own template, everything you build in the Visual Builder shows up exactly as designed.

Keep it light. One section, a headline that says what is coming, and one way to reach you is enough. Publish the page when you are done. Do not worry about it being publicly visible for a moment; the next step takes over the whole site.

Step 3: Turn on Site Visibility

  1. In wp-admin, go to Divi Torque and open Site Visibility.
  2. Pick the mode: Coming Soon or Maintenance (503).
  3. Under Page to display, choose the page you just published.
  4. Flip the switch. A confirmation dialog makes you confirm before the site is hidden, so nobody arms it by accident.

From this moment every visitor sees your holding page, wherever on the site they land. You and other administrators keep seeing the live site, so you can continue building. wp-admin, AJAX, cron, the REST API, feeds, and robots.txt all keep working normally.

A red badge stays in your admin bar on every screen while a mode is active. That badge has saved more than one launch day.

Step 4: Verify the status code, not just the page

Two checks, one minute:

  • Open the site in a private browser window. You should see the holding page. In your normal window you deliberately see the live site, because administrators bypass the mode.
  • Check the actual response: curl -I https://yoursite.com. Coming Soon answers HTTP/1.1 200 OK. Maintenance answers HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable with a Retry-After header.

If the terminal is not your thing, any online HTTP header checker shows the same information.

Will my coming soon page be indexed?

In Coming Soon mode, yes, and that is the point. The page serves 200, so Google can index your teaser, your brand name, and your description before launch day. If you do not want that, use Maintenance mode instead, or keep Coming Soon and add a noindex tag with your SEO plugin. In Maintenance mode nothing new gets indexed; the 503 tells crawlers to come back later and your existing rankings are preserved.

Optional: countdown and email signup

Site Visibility does not bundle a countdown widget, on purpose. The holding page is a full Divi page, so add whatever you like with regular modules: a countdown, an email opt-in form, social links. They render and work exactly as on any other Divi page.

Launch day: switch it off properly

  1. Turn the mode off in Divi Torque, Site Visibility.
  2. Load the site in a private window and confirm visitors see the real site.
  3. If you run a caching plugin, clear its cache. Site Visibility sends no-cache headers while active, but your first public pageviews should never hit a stale cache.

If the holding page is not showing

  • You are logged in as an administrator. That is the bypass working, not a bug. Use a private window.
  • The selected page is not published. Site Visibility only renders published pages.
  • A server-level or CDN cache is serving the old page. Purge it once after arming the mode.

Full settings and developer filters are covered in the Site Visibility documentation. Site Visibility ships with Divi Torque Pro alongside every Pro module and extension.