How to enable maintenance mode in Drupal

Posted on January 1st, 2016

Maintenance mode is a very essential feature for popular content management systems like Drupal. There are many updates that developers cannot perform while the website is live. In most cases, if we have to update the database in production, we have to take down the site in Maintenance mode. When we enable the maintenance mode, the customers or visitors will see “Temporarily Inaccessible” messages with “503” maintenance mode status code.

Drupal provides us a feature to enable or disable the maintenance mode on our website. The process to enable the maintenance mode is very easy and does not require you to have any technical knowledge. You can put your website in the maintenance mode within a minute and you can also display the message as per your requirements. So, Let’s get started with the step by step tutorial.

Note: Note that when you put your site in the maintenance mode, only the users having “Use the site in Maintenance mode” permission will be able to access the site.

Enable Maintenance mode in Drupal

Step 1: Log-in to your Admin Panel with the use of your Username and Password.

Step 2: Click Configuration in the Tabs section.

Step 3: Scroll-Down and find the DEVELOPMENT section.

Step 4: In the DEVELOPMENT section Click on Maintenance mode.

Step 5: This link will take you to the page as shown below image. There is a Checkbox and the text area in the form.

Step 6: when you tick on the Checkbox to TRUE. It means you just put your Website in Maintenance Mode. Your website link will take you to another page, And display a message as you want.

Step 7: And the white space is for the message while your site is under maintenance mode. Type your Text Message to your visitors in that box.

Step 8: While in maintenance mode when someone visits your website, they will see the maintenance mode message you have set in the textbox.

Step 9: To SAVE to changes Click on SAVE Configuration.

So, this is how you can enable maintenance mode in Drupal. To disable it, just untick the checkbox and click on the “Save configuration” button. We hope you liked this tutorial. If you are facing any problem, feel free to let us know in the comment section.