Omg, I don’t believe how idiotic I can be sometimes.
For the past couple of months, I’ve been having issues with this website in terms of subscribers being able to access it. For some reason I was getting a ‘Coming Soon’ page and no matter what I tried (including going to an earlier, backed up version of the blog) I couldn’t get rid of it. I scoured the web for solutions, but of course didn’t ask the host what to do, because their own ‘Help’ section was not helpful at all.
Multiple YouTube videos said the solution was simple. Just go to the host site, and there was a switch you could throw and it would go away. Except….there’s no such switch on the current version of the host platform. Bupkus. Another suggested disabling the plugin that controls the cache, that would get rid of it. Nope, didn’t work. I went to Reddit, looking for a solution, and oddly enough, someone had posted about it, then deleted the post, but the replies still existed. Though they were several years old and not helpful at all.
I was about to the point to deleting the website and starting again from scratch. This morning, after doing my trash/recycling duties, I sat down one more time and put my thinking cap on. There had to be a solution to this, and it shouldn’t be difficult. I was probably not looking at it correctly this whole time. I’ve been looking for a convoluted fix and for your average blogger, it should be simple. So I dug into the host tools that they require for their hosted WordPress sites.
And there it was, plain as day. Maintenance Mode: Turn this on to disable access from the public, but SysAdmins can still access the site via password. There it was. The solution! Clicked on the slider and checked the site both on my computer here and my mobile that wasn’t connected to my home network. Both worked just fine. No Coming Soon page, no hiccups trying to get to the site. I can’t tell you how many times I saw that Maintenance thing and just either ignored it or thought it was for someone else. I must have thought to myself; “It can’t be this easy” and went on looking for a more complicated fix.
O M G. Sometimes I can be so thick. Well, at least that’s fixed. On to something else. If you’re seeing this, thanks not only for reading, but for sticking around until I got back here. You’re appreciated.