I am running several websites and use GoDaddy wordpress hosting and ManageWP services.
When I turn under construction on with PRO or X, I get 503 errors and ManageWP reports my site as down. If I turn under construction off all is fine. What can I do about not returning the 503 errors?
Hi There @designerken
Are you using a caching plugin to enable Gzip compression? It may not work with Under Construction, primarily because it modifies the WP_Query to be able to output the correct header code (503).
If you could let us know which plugin etc you’re using.
Thanks!
No GZIP, no Caching plug-ins.
Hi there @designerken,
Getting 503’s is correct, as per https://httpstatuses.com/503 it can be for scheduled maintenance, service unavailable etc. Returning any other header status code would be considered incorrect from a SEO standpoint.
Thanks!
How is that 503 is correct for an under construction/coming soon page? It isn’t in down because of maintenance mode and services are available. What am I missing here?
This is the definition of the 503 status code from the RFC that defines these status codes:
The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.
Hi there,
As my colleague mentioned this must be something related to the Managed Hosting functionality of GoDaddy. You can test the case by avoiding usage of our extension and use a 3rd party plugin such as:
See if those plugins also through the 503 message. If yes then it is related to your hosting service provider settings.
One other point is that this is happening on your server and in our case, it is working with no problem and shows the message,
Thank you.
Hi Chris,
You are incorrect, this is not a hosting issue. To test this case, I can simply turn on and off your plug-in to see the HTTP status change. Installing and turning on different plug-ins is pointless, unless they are also setting the status to 503, besides that I am not putting the site in maintenance mode, I am creating a coming soon page.
If you took a look at your code for the under construction plugin you will see that the x-under-construction > functions > output.php file has a function called x_under_construction_output that sets the HTTP status to 503 in line 41.
Maintenance mode is different than a coming soon page. I can see an argument being made for under construction and maintenance being the same/similar and wanting the status to be 503 so that you are not dinged for SEO and you want the bots to come back and re-index your site at a later date.
However if I am creating a coming soon page, wouldn’t i want the headers to return a 200 status so that it can start indexing that page? So that the company’s contact and business information is starting to propagate in search engines.
Hi there,
mmmm… this is an interesting debate and I can not rule out both methods. In one hand 503 response is good to show Google that this site is under maintenance and Google will reindex the page in the future as soon as 200 is set.
In other hand having 200 response is a good point which shows that the site is already up and running and will soon have new content.
We took the first approach in our plugin. I’m sure you will be able to find other 3rd party plugins if yo are interested in having the second approach.
Thank you.
Since it is an easy fix and used only while the site in being built in my use cases, I will just edit the plugin directly to change the HTTP status.
It would be nice if you guys could add in an advanced option to select 200 or 503 or to be able to hook into it with a custom function in a child theme.
Hi there,
Thank you for your feedback and understanding. We will submit this to our developers for further review.
Thanks!
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