Website needs to be taken down over a weekend for maintenance

[rickbyrd]

My company will be doing some maintenance on our website and want to take it down over a weekend and then bring it back up on Sunday evening or Monday morning.

What is the best way to do this with our Hubspot site?

I have read that the best practice is to have the site be in 503 error mode.

We do want to have a message displayed about the maintenance but we want no other options/functionality of the navigation menus or any links on the page.

I basically need to figure out how to force the site into a maintenance mode and display a maintenance page.

Thanks!

[mikedupuy · Accepted solution]

👋🏻 @rickbyrd,

Do you have the HubSpot CMS? One idea could be to build a simple webpage with an under construction message and remove the global header and footer modules. Then, when your site is about to go into maintenance, you can change the URL of your site’s homepage to something else (e.g. /temp) and set your temporary under construction page live with your default “domain.com/“ URL.

One benefit of this compared to sending to an error message is that users won’t think that your app/company is down and instead will know to check back later.

Not as great as staging and pushing to production, but could be a quick/easy fix for now.

-mike

If you found my response helpful, please mark it as a solution 🙂

[Comercialmente]

Hi! Thanks for proposing this solution. 

Q: Where do you tell the CMS to  change the home page URL to mydomain.com/folder, or whatever folder?

Thanks in advance,

[rickbyrd]

@mikedupuy, 

That is exactly what we did.

Thanks!

[Phil_Vallender]

Hi @rickbyrd 

HubSpot doesn't have an option to automatically do this. 

Does maintenance mean changes to content and/or design? If so, the normal recommendation would be that these are developed and tested in the staging area, and then pushed live when you are happy - and still at a time of low traffic ideally. Could this work in your situation? 

Hope this helps.

[rickbyrd]

@Phil_Vallender,

Thanks for replying.  Unfortunately this will not work in our situation.  It's a lot more detailed than just making content and design changes.

We have decided to make a new "home" page with our maintenance message and redirect all of our pages to the home page.  Luckily, we only have 76 pages to redirect.  Not ideal but seems to be the best option for us.