The history of the product began in April 2012. I was a web designer and the head of a small group of developers who were building websites for customers from the USA and Europe.
We had a problem showing the site to the client during development or when the site was ready. There were no ready-made solutions, and we made the plugin for ourselves and later made it free for the WordPress community.
Why?
Maintenance allows the WordPress site administrator to close the site into the coming soon mode.
User benefit
If the site is not ready, you can set up a temporary stub page with all the necessary information for users and simultaneously develop the website. Or leave maintenance page for next year.
Use cases
- When technical work, updates, new functionality are performing on the site, the maintenance is turned on, and the user does not see the update process, errors, etc.
- When the site is ready for the client, we want to show the result, the client considers the temporary page “The site is under development” and a logical form, after authorization, the client sees the site we made.
- A temporary page can be a site for business, with plugins you can configure the page as coming soon, add all the necessary information, contact form, subscription, etc.
Business Benefits
- Contribution to the WordPress community
- Development company get new leads
- Popular and useful product in the portfolio
Technologies
WordPress, PHP, HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery
Product story
After testing the product MVP on customers, I received positive feedback and the question of where to download this plugin. I decided to release Maintenance as a free plugin. On the first day, there were more than 3000 installations and questions about the pro version. Within several months, the Maintenance PRO addon was built, which works as an addition to the free version.
Design story and changes
In the first version, there was a problem that we put the logo of our company. When users downloaded the free plugin and installed, they often did not change the logo, and it remained by default. We received a lot of requests to support from third parties because they thought that the site where installed Maintenance plugin it’s our website because of our logo displayed.
From interviews with users, I learned that the login form is not required. Everyone wanted a countdown counter and we add it in PRO. And I added cool character in a helmet to give emotions and empathy when the site is down or in maintenance mode.
For the year we received more than 100,000 downloads and useful feedback, users loved our product very much and wrote words of love and long letters with wishes in support.
I designed the new interface, interaction, and thank to the developer Artem Yakovlev brought ideas to life with the code, the entire history of changes in the free version was saved on Github.
In the new version, we improved absolutely everything. It was an evolution of the plugin. In 2013, there was nothing like this. We had a problem; developers from India and other countries began to copy us in large quantities. At first, we were upset that they were copying us, and then we were delighted, which means that we did something outstanding, copied, and distributed the PRO version on torrents.
The backend was straightforward to use, and this was one of the key points why customers enjoy using it. Easy setup during a few minutes, no pain – success product.
The product had a free version, and a paid version, after one year after launch. But the product doesn’t have a website, only demo pages. Need to do promo website.
I made a design and development myself based on our other free product, the Fruitful WordPress theme
As a result, the page was highly ranked by Google. The number of downloads increased, sales began to grow. We were satisfied, talked with users, tested new solutions and tried to update the plugin once every three months, in order to be better than competitors who constantly appeared.
Redesign in 2017
We wanted to make a new demo because at our discretion it was outdated. Theme switcher was very useful and stylish.
Aswell with theme switcher, the home page got a new design.
Unfortunately, I made a big mistake in thinking about beauty in the first place. The new page has become more beautiful, but analytics showed bad numbers. As a result, the bounce rate has increased and the session time has become less in comparison with the previous page.
How it works
One user posted an article reviewing the plugin in Italian where there was a video. Sitting at the iMac, he spoke in Italian how our plugin works. Together with Denis Mamontov, I thought why we don’t have such a video? We can do it ourselves. See the result
Stats
Plugin in the list of top 100 plugins by popularity with almost 4 million downloads
Customer reviews
“Have been using Pro for 2 years”
“I always use this plugin for all the websites I build for clients. It is simple and unique. Thank you”
“Super easy to use, i needed around to 1 min to set the plugins! best under construction ever!”
In September 2019 the rights and authorship of the plugin was sold to webfactory ltd.
