What to do if your WordPress website gets crawled whilst using a Maintenance Mode Plugin?

Sometimes you'll find the need to use a maintenance mode plugin like our free Launchpad Plugin on your WordPress installation when you're busy working away on your website behind the scenes.

If your website has been up and running for a while, Google and other search engines will be regularly crawling your website. If you're unsure as to what 'crawling' is, here's a definition;

Web search engines and some other sites use Web crawling or spidering software to update their web content or indexes of others sites' web content. Web crawlers can copy all the pages they visit for later processing by a search engine that indexes the downloaded pages so that users can search them much more quickly.

The crawling can take place at any time even when your maintenance mode plugin is active and that means that it will crawl your title and meta description of the plugin rather than what you originally had set for your website.

It could come out looking something like;

Title: Our New Site: Coming Soon
Description: We're working on our new site and it's coming soon.

instead of;

Title: Premium WordPress Themes | Obox Themes
Description: This is Obox. Themes ... Take your site further with Obox Plugins. Optimize your ... Gain access to free themes and plugins by simply signing up to Obox today.

The effects of the crawl can last until the next crawl and like I said earlier, there's no exact time defined for when it can happen so you could be stuck with the maintenance mode title and description for some time.

What you can do to change that

If the above does happen to you, there is something that you can do to hurry up the process so Google crawls your site and starts displaying your search results with the correct title and meta description. Follow the steps below;