Site Visibility

Site Visibility hides your site behind a holding page while you work on it. It was previously called Maintenance Mode. The extension has two modes, and the difference between them is the HTTP status code your site answers with. That detail decides how search engines treat your site while it is hidden.

The two modes

Coming Soon serves your holding page with HTTP 200. The page is indexable, so a pre-launch teaser can start ranking before the site goes live. Use this before a launch.

Maintenance serves your holding page with HTTP 503 and a Retry-After header set to one hour. This tells search engines the outage is temporary, so a short maintenance window does not hurt your rankings. Both modes also send no-cache headers so visitors never see a stale copy.

How to turn it on

Create and publish the page you want visitors to see. It is a normal page, so you can design it with the full Divi Builder.
Go to Divi Torque and open Site Visibility.
Pick the mode: Coming Soon or Maintenance (503).
Choose your page under Page to display.
Flip the switch. A confirmation dialog asks you to confirm before the site is hidden.

While a mode is active, a red badge appears in the admin bar on every screen. It links back to the setting so you cannot forget the site is hidden.

Who still sees the live site

Administrators bypass the holding page. Technically, any logged-in user with the edit_theme_options capability sees the live site, which on most sites means administrators only. Editors, authors, and subscribers see the holding page like any visitor.

The takeover also never touches wp-admin, AJAX, cron, the REST API, XML-RPC, feeds, or robots.txt. Your background machinery keeps running.

How to verify what visitors see

Open your site in a private browser window. As a logged-in administrator you deliberately see the live site, so a normal tab will not show you the holding page. To confirm the status code, run curl -I https://yoursite.com and check the first line: 200 for Coming Soon, 503 for Maintenance, with a Retry-After header in the 503 response.

Site Visibility does not bundle its own countdown or email capture. The holding page is a regular Divi page, so place a Number Counter, a form module, or any other module on it and it renders exactly as designed.

Launch day

Switch the mode off in Divi Torque, then load the site in a private window to confirm visitors see the real thing. If you use a caching plugin, clear its cache so the first visitors do not get a cached holding page.

For developers

Two filters are available: divitorque_site_visibility_bypass lets you allow extra visitors through (for example a secret preview key), and divitorque_site_visibility_template lets you override which template renders the holding page.

Frequently asked questions

Why did the name change from Maintenance Mode?
The old name described only one of the two modes. Site Visibility covers both Coming Soon and Maintenance, which behave differently on purpose.

Which mode should I use before a launch?
Coming Soon. It serves HTTP 200, so search engines can index your teaser page and your launch starts with a head start.

Will a long maintenance window hurt SEO?
Keep 503 windows short. The 503 status protects you during normal maintenance, but a site that serves 503 for weeks will eventually be crawled less. For a long rebuild, prefer Coming Soon with a useful teaser page.

Is Site Visibility free?
No. It is part of Divi Torque Pro, along with every Pro module and extension. See pricing.