How to Create a Simple Coming Soon Page for Your Website

Transcript

Hi, Michele here with “Bergh Consulting”. thank you for joining me today! in this video, I’m going to cover how to add a coming soon or you know, that the website is down for maintenance type page to your site. So that if somebody comes to your page, they’re not seeing a partially finished or not even started website yet, but instead, they’re seeing a custom page that you’ve added to let them know that you have work going on in the back end of your website and you will be live soon.

So, the first thing you want to do is log into the back end of your website. and once you’re here, you’re going to come down to the “Plugin” section and go to either “Add new” or “Installed”. and there’s an “Add new” button right here in the installed section. now I’ve already installed this plugin but I’m going to show you how to find it on here. you’re going to come over here and type in “coming soon”. there are quite a few different plugins that do this type of a feature. but I’m going to show you the one that seems to be the most commonly used and has a very nice setup at a free level. it’s this one by “SeedProd”. so you can see that there’s over a million activations already in place. it is regularly updated. it’s compatible with my version of WordPress. these are all things that you want to look for when you’re looking for quality plugins not just for this type of a plugin. and the ratings are really good. So, you would click on the “Install Now” button. that would show up here, if I didn’t already have it installed and when that’s done, your next option is going to be to “Activate it”, which I’ve also already done.

So, once it’s been activated, it’s going to show up in your sidebar and you can go straight over to the “Pages” section and I’ve started one here as well. but I’m going to show you around the back end. so either one of these will work but there are some subtle differences. so depending on your need, most people are doing a coming soon page. So, we’ll cover that here and you can do things like add your logo, add custom text, you can do some things that are a little bit more complicated in terms of connecting your email marketing campaign provider to it, so that you can add a sign up box for people to get notified when you are live. but we’re going to keep this really simple for right now. Generally, this is a short term piece of content that you’re going to display on your site. So, i recommend adding your logo and some sort of phrase here. Minimally, this is really enough to get you started but if it’s going to be an extended length of time, then you might want to look at doing something a little bit more, shall we say official? something a little bit more desirable, so that you are maybe looking to connect with your email marketing campaign provider. so that you can take those email addresses down from people visiting your site and let them know when you’re live. probably add in some additional branding but for the short term situations, this is a click and drag type process.

So, you would use an image box to add your logo. you would add a headline box to add larger text. if you don’t like what you did it’s very easy to click and delete. and then you will also see some that are grayed out and just know that those are typically part of a premium package. So, they’re not available to you in the free version. but the free version really does do a lot. and you generally don’t need to have the pro version. and once you have it the way that you want it, then you can go ahead and save it,. and then if you want to preview it, you can click here. now I will tell you that if you’ve been in your website already and been playing around in there, it may not show up right away because of something called “caching”. if you’re not familiar with that, caching is really just a method of helping pages to load faster and not require as much bandwidth to do so. So, they show you a stored version. basically an old version of that page.

So, if you go to preview and don’t see this page, then you may want to consider using an “incognito” or “private browser”. see how I can’t see this but when I go to a private browser, i was able to see this here. so I know that it’s working. So, if you go to it at first and you don’t see it, go ahead and click in the upper, it’s usually in the upper right hand corner look for something like “new private window” or “incognito window” or tab, click on that and try viewing it in there. if that doesn’t work, then try a different browser. but if you’re sure that you’ve put in the information correctly, that you have it activated here which can also be done. you can tell right here that it’s published because my only option is to unpublish. then you should be good and you can trust that people are seeing what you want them to see. and then you can just click out of here. Again, you can tell that it is active. I’m going to try previewing it this way. Yeah, it’s still not showing up but you can tell that it’s active here. and if I go to a private window, i can see it just fine right here.

and that’s it. So, at its core, it can be very simple. I recommend keeping it pretty simple, unless it’s going to be up for an extended length of time. then you’ll want to do a little bit more to finesse how it looks and how it works. so that you can hype it up and collect those names in the process while you’re working on the back end of your site. thanks for joining me and I hope this was helpful. I’ll see you in the next video.