Hello and welcome to the series of technology-related tutorials helping you to start a piano studio website. In this tutorial, we are talking about one very small but important preparatory step. Right after website hosting is configured but before it has all the content ready for the public. We recommend you display a coming soon message on your home page.
When hosting your piano studio website has just been configured and WordPress installed, your website is going to be available to everybody right away. It will show as empty and even worse render a lot of sample data to the visitors. It is considered not very good practice and we recommend you temporarily switch your site into Coming Soon mode. It shows a single coming soon message on your home page and allows you to continue crafting your content. Once you feel fully confident that your website is ready for the public you turn this message off.
For that, log in to your WordPress. Then navigate to the Dashboard section.
Switch to Plugins / Add New section of your WordPress main menu on the left. The Main menu is going to be the most important menu as everything can be accessed from there.
In this section, you can add new plugins and one we are interested in is called Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode by SeedProd. You can locate it by typing the word “coming” in the search box on the right. It is one of the most popular plugins for implementing this feature. We have used it on many occasions ourselves.
Click the Install button at the right top corner of the plugin tile. It will install this plugin to your WordPress. Once installed the button will change to Activate. Click the Activate button.
Once activated you will be redirected to the configuration section of the plugin itself. Select Enable Coming Soon Mode among the checkboxes and click Save All Changes.
If you now open your browser in Incognito mode and navigate to the home page of your piano studio website https://yourpiano.studio all you will see is the message below.
The reason you open your website in Incognito is to see how your website looks like for the anonymous visitors. This way you make sure sample data is not exposed to the world while you are crafting your actual content.
What’s next?
This was a simple but important step in ensuring that your work in progress is not exposed to the public and bots. Once you feel fully confident go ahead and select Disabled status on the home page of the plugin. Click Save All Changes and tell everybody about your brand new piano studio website!
