Down for Maintenance

There are a few situations where you might want to take your store offline:

• Performing backups
• Disruption of business due to personal emergency
• Moving your website to another hoster
• Updating your stock counts if you track inventory

The configuration screen Admin > Configuration > Website Maintenance allows you to put your store in maintenance mode and controls how your store appears to customers when it is down for maintenance.

The behavior of a store which is down for maintenance is as follows:

• Customers will only see your home page; they are not permitted to browse.
• You may restrict their view of the store further if desired. For example, you can turn off sideboxes or hide prices as well; see the possibilities on the Website Maintenance configuration page.

Here’s what a site might look like in down for maintenance mode:

You could turn off the sideboxes during down for maintenance, and it would look like this:

As the storeowner, you may want to still be able to browse your store while it is in maintenance mode. To do so, go to Admin > Configuration > Website Maintenance, and add your IP to the list in the Down For Maintenance (exclude this IP-Address) field.