Occasionally we have to perform server maintenance that makes your website temporarily unavailable (for example, tomorrow night at 8pm PST). When the server is down for maintenance, visitors are given a nice message to help them understand what is happening (so they don't think your site is broken). However, before the server goes down, they may be performing critical tasks, writing a comment, purchasing a product, etc. And so it's important to let them know that things are about to stop working. We have implemented a new alert message that will appear at the top of your website a couple minutes before the server goes down for maintenance. This will give visitors an opportunity to save their work or finish their checkout in advance.

The message is quite prominent, but it only appears for a few minutes. You have the opportunity to opt out of this message if you do not want to notify your visitors. To opt out, go to your Administrative Control Panel and once you've logged in, go to the "Admin" tab. Edit your "Site Info" button, scroll down to the "Technical Info" section and selected "disabled" in the System Alerts. Then save. If you disable the alerts, your visitors will not get this notice a few minutes before the site is going into maintenance mode.

If you do want this recommended notification, you do not need to do anything. However you do have the option of setting the number of minutes you want the notification to display before the maintenance begins. By default it's set to 2 minutes, but you could choose to display it 10 minutes before by editing the "Pre Alert Time" and setting it to 600 seconds (equals 10 minutes).  The exact maintenance times are imprecise, so a larger window is advised. You also have the option of inputting your own custom alert message, but we highly recommend you do not interfere with our carefully crafted message.

Below is the message your visitors will see:

MAINTENANCE NOTIFICATION

Please note that we will be performing important server maintenance in a few minutes, during which time the server will be unavailable for approximately 5-10 minutes. If you are in the middle of something important, please save your work or hold off on any critical actions until we are finished.

We hope that this new feature helps your visitors cope with periodic server maintenance. As always your feedback is appreciated.