A practical guide to building a branded maintenance page for WordPress block themes using a single PHP hook in functions.php and the Site Editor. The hook intercepts template loading to serve a custom 'Maintenance' template to logged-out visitors, while logged-in users see the live site normally. Two variants are covered: a minimal version for routine updates and an SEO-friendly version that sends 503, Retry-After, and no-cache headers. Once the hook is in place, the maintenance page is created, styled, and toggled entirely through the Site Editor with no further code changes needed.
Table of contents
The hookCreating the maintenance templateActivating and deactivating maintenance modeTestingConclusion11.6K Impressions