Comments on: The simplest way to set-up a “we’ll be back shortly” page

By: Website Rankings Dropped Fast - 10 Possible Causes - Lets Build Websites

Website Rankings Dropped Fast - 10 Possible Causes - Lets Build Websites — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:32:44 +0000

[…] If you have a planned downtime you can setup a 503 code which tells the search engines that you’re aware of the situation and that they should try again later. You can even set a return time for the search engines to crawl your site. This is pretty technical for the average webmaster but you can see more details from the Google blog. Another technical resource is this post. […]

By: Brett Stauner (@mightybs)

Brett Stauner (@mightybs) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:31:01 +0000

I use this rewrite condition to allow access to anything static to be able to reach stylesheets, images, etc much like Ernesto, but easily allow for anything that does not need to be processed by my application.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule .* – [R=503]

By: Mario

Mario — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:20:05 +0000

Thanks for this, and thanks to Ernesto for the updated rule (a reminder that you need to free those things up if your page is going to be styled at all using your page’s standard template)

By: Kirrus

Kirrus — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:49:06 +0000

Another ‘thanks’ post here :)

By: Ernesto

Ernesto — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:09:21 +0000

FWIW, my maintenance page had some images which were not displaying as they were caught in the RewriteRule, so I changed it to:

RewriteRule !\.(ico|gif|jpg|png|css)$ – [R=503]

to allow those extensions to still be served.

By: Ernesto

Ernesto — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:57:50 +0000

Great! Thanks for sharing!