Introduction

There might be times during work on your site when you will need to make it temporarily inaccessible for visitors. Enabling a maintenance mode while the work is done prevents the visitors from seeing what is going on behind the curtains of your website. Today, you are going to learn how to manage the “Maintenance Mode” of your Online Store.

Step 1: Accessing the maintenance page

In order to be able to manage the maintenance mode of your Online Store, you first have to login into the Admin area of your Prestashop. After that in the left vertical navigation menu look for the “Shop parameters” option. When you find it, please, click on it.

When you click it a drop-down menu will appear with the following options:

• “General”
• “Order settings”
• “Product settings”
• “Customer settings”
• “Contact”
• “Traffic and SEO”
• “Search”
• “Merchant Expertise”

From all the options that you are provided with, please, click the “General” option so you can be redirected to a page called “Preferences”.

You will notice that the “Preferences” page has two tabs: “General” and “Maintenance”.

In today’s tutorial you are only going to work with the “Maintenance” tab, so for that purpose, please, click on it.

When you click it the page will reload and will present you with the content of the “Maintenance” page.

Step 2: Managing the maintenance of your Online Store

Once redirected to the “Maintenance” page you will be presented with only one section there. In that section, you will see three fields and a button. Let’s start as they follow:

• “Enable shop” - with that option you can temporarily disable your store while you are performing maintenance in background.

• “Maintenance IP” - Despite the maintenance that is going on, you can still allow access to your team or to yourself, by filling the IP addresses that should have access to the store. To add a new IP address, please, click the “Add my IP” button. You will find it right next to the field for “Maintenance IP”. Please, bear in mind, that if you want to add more than one IP addresses you have to separate them with commas “,”.

• “Custom maintenance text”  – that feature defines what your visitors will see on the frontend of your Online Store when the “Maintenance mode” is enabled.

Once you are done setting the options in the “Maintenance” section, please, click the “Save” button at the bottom of the section.

After clicking that a “Successful update” message will appear above the section in the “Maintenance” page and you are all set.

Congratulations! Today you learned the benefits from enabling maintenance mode and how to actually do that.