In this video we're going to talk about Maintenance Mode. Maintenance mode allows you to bring your store offline so that customers won't be able to browse around your store pages. This is useful if you need to troubleshoot an issue, or if you need to make edits to your store pages and you don't want any customers browsing around your pages until you're done with your work.
To access Maintenance Mode, login to your Store Admin and click on Store Settings, scroll down until you see the Maintenance Mode area. You turn Maintenance Mode on by bubbling in this Offline option. At the moment, the server time is nearly twenty hundred hours eastern time, which is almost 8 at night. So if I type in 20:10, it's going to go offline at 8:10 in the evening. If I click “Update” and go back to the front side of the store I'll be able to hit Refresh and I will see a warning that the store will be going into Maintenance Mode in about 10 minutes. This message lets existing shoppers know that they have a limited time to complete checkout, if indeed they want to buy something at the moment. After 9 Minutes passes, the store will automatically go offline.
If you want to bring your store offline immediately, just change this time value to an hour and minute that has already occurred. So if I change this to 19:00 for instance, 1900 is 7 p.m. and that occurred an hour ago. I'll just click “Update” to save my work and when I go back to the front of the store and hit Refresh,” I no longer see a warning message. Instead, I see a message explaining that the store is not available at this time. The Warning Message and the Maintenance Mode message can be customized to your needs. To edit them, go back into your Store Admin and scroll back down to the Maintenance Mode area and you will see text areas for both of these messages. If you need to make a change, you can do so here. Be sure to click Update to save your work and your customized maintenance mode message will display on every page of your store until you bring your store back online.
Lastly, there is an area here in the Maintenance Mode section where you can define allowed IP addresses. You can see that the computer has this IP address. If I copy this update, even though the store is technically in Maintenance Mode, I will be able to see the store pages as if it weren't, because my IP address is in that list of allowed IP addresses. This allows me to move around my store pages and do the work I need done, while what the rest of the world sees is that my store is offline.
When you're done with the work, you need to do be sure to turn Maintenance Mode off so that customers can continue shopping on your store. To do that, simply click on the Store Online bubble and click the “Update” button and customers will once again be able to access your stores pages.