PrestaShop Maintenance Mode With Some Best Practices
The maintenance mode in PrestaShop is useful when you are just starting your store and don’t want to have it indexed by the search engines.
I always advise starting in this mode (with a few other tips) and disabling it when you are ready to launch your store.
I will share few valuable tips on this PrestaShop feature.
How to Enable Maintenance Mode in PrestaShop
Log in to your back office, click on Shop Parameters, then General menu item.
On the opened page, click Maintenance, and you will arrive at the settings page.
Checkbox on the top of the form “Enable Shop” is the toggle you were looking for. Setting to NO will enable maintenance mode. Nobody will be able to browser catalog, make orders, and view static pages.
IP Address Limitation for PrestaShop Maintenance Mode
How would you access store yourself after maintenance mode enable? Simply by adding IP or multiple IP addresses for your staff members.
Listed IP addresses will see normal store. Other users will see maintenance page.
How to Find Your IP Address
To learn the IP address of your browser/computer, go to Google and type “my IP”. It will display an IP address you can use on the PrestaShop maintenance page.
In Maintenance IP input, you can list multiple IP addresses (when you have a few or more staff members), separate them by a comma.
How to Disable Maintenance Mode in PrestaShop
To disable PrestaShop maintenance mode and launch your store, go to the back office, click Shop Parameters, General menu item, and select Maintenance tab.
On the opened page, make sure Enable Shop checkbox is set to YES.
How to Enable/Disable Maintenance Mode from the PrestaShop Database
If for some reason, you can’t access your settings to launch your store or have other needs and you can only do this from the database level - then it’s still easy!
In your database administration tool like PHPMyAdmin, open configuration database table (ps_configuration or similar), find entry PS_SHOP_ENABLE, and set it to 1 (number one).
How to Edit PrestaShop Maintenance Mode Design
It is not that easy to edit the maintenance mode page template for PrestaShop, but still possible if you have some programming background (at least HTML).
Every theme in the themes folder will contain the maintenance.tpl page. This file holds HTML code for that page, and you are free to customize it.
Some addons could make maintenance mode customizations from the back office, but they cost 40-80 USD. It’s not worth it since why your users might care much about a store that is not yet launched?
Save your money and better buy one-page checkout or clean URLs addon instead.
More PrestaShop Customizations
More PrestaShop customizations could be found on PrestaShop blog.
