by
Troy Chaplin
5 (2 reviews)
Planned Outage for Block Themes
Simple maintenance mode for block themes. Shows a maintenance template to logged-out visitors.
Planned Outage for Block Themes ranks #30,520 among WordPress.org plugins with 10+ active installations, is #671 of 1,658 in the Performance category, a 5/5 rating from 2 reviews, and was last updated Jul 14, 2026. Data from WordPress.org, refreshed twice daily — see methodology.
Tested up to WP 7 (Current: 7.1.4)
v1.4.0
Current Version v1.4.0
Updated 3 months ago
Last Update on 14 Jul, 2026
Refreshed 1 week ago
Last Refreshed on
#671 of 1,658 in Performance
Top 50% by installs
Rank
#30,520
—
No change
Active Installs
10+
—
No change
KW Avg Position
127
3 worse
Downloads
277
+3 today
Support Resolved
0%
—
No change
Rating
100%
Review 5 out of 5
5
(2 reviews)
Next Milestone 20
10+
20+
7,347
Ranks to Climb
-
Growth Needed
8,000,000
Active Installs
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Current
#30,520
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5.0
2 reviews
Overall
100%
5
2
(100%)
4
0
(0%)
3
0
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2
0
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1
0
(0%)
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- Version
- 1.4.0
- Last Updated
- Jul 14, 2026
- Requires WP
- 6.6+
- Tested Up To
- 7
- PHP Version
- 7.3 or higher
- Author
- Troy Chaplin
Support & Rating
- Rating
- ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5
- Reviews
- 2
- Support Threads
- 0
- Resolved
- 0%
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Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Planned Outage for Block Themes
You have two options: Site Editor: Go to Appearance > Editor > Templates, create a new template named "maintenance" Theme file: Add a maintenance.html file to your theme's /templates/ folder
Set a start and end date/time under Settings > Planned Outage (times are entered in your site's timezone). Maintenance mode activates automatically when the window begins and deactivates when it ends — no manual toggling and no reliance on WP-Cron: the window is checked on every request, so the switch is exact. The manual toggle still works independently; maintenance is active if either the toggle is on or the current time is inside the window. During a scheduled window the Retry-After header automatically reflects the time remaining.
No, and this is a WordPress limitation rather than a plugin bug. During a real update WordPress creates a .maintenance file and ends the request very early in its boot process — before any plugin code loads — showing its built-in "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance" screen. No plugin can render a block template at that point. These windows are short (WordPress considers maintenance over after 10 minutes) and only occur during actual updates. If you want a custom page for those moments, WordPress supports a hand-made wp-content/maintenance.php drop-in, which is independent of this plugin.
All logged-in users can browse the site normally. Only logged-out visitors see the maintenance template. You can also enable search engine bots to bypass maintenance mode, or generate a bypass link for non-logged-in users.
This sets the Retry-After HTTP header, which tells search engines how long to wait before checking your site again. Options range from 30 minutes to 1 day. You can also select "Pre-Launch (indefinite)" for sites that aren't live yet, which disables duration tracking and admin warnings.
When enabled, the plugin generates a secret URL you can share with anyone who needs to view the site during maintenance without logging in. A 12-hour cookie is set on first visit so they can navigate freely. You can regenerate the link at any time to invalidate the previous one.
For short maintenance periods (under 2 hours), the default settings are fine. For longer maintenance (over 2 hours), consider enabling search engine access. For maintenance lasting more than a day, always enable it to prevent pages from being removed from search indexes.
The plugin returns a 503 (Service Unavailable) status with a Retry-After header, which tells search engines the site is temporarily unavailable.
The plugin detects popular full-page cache plugins (Surge, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, WP Rocket) and displays a warning on the settings page when one is active. Caches are automatically flushed when settings are saved to ensure the maintenance page is served immediately. Server-level caches (Nginx FastCGI cache, Varnish, Cloudflare, etc.) cannot be detected or flushed by the plugin. If maintenance mode is not working and you use server-level caching, flush that cache manually.
Simply deactivate and delete the plugin. The plugin stores options prefixed with pobt_ which are removed when you deactivate the plugin.
