A sound coming soon page can be way more important than many people realize. As a matter of fact, many developers will tell you that creating such a page is the best way to start building your new website. It’s right up there with creating a mobile app for your business, but while creating it requires help from a mobile app design agency, the coming soon page can be very successfully crafted on your own.
There are three reasons for this: SEO, lead generation, and communicating with your potential visitors.
First, let’s talk about how Google will rank you. You see, even before your site is up and running, you can feed it that precious SEO juice through a page like this. Page titles and keywords can be utilized to position your website properly in Google’s eyes. Then there’s the fact that this way, Google will consider your website a bit older than it actually is, giving it a further boost in ranking.
Finally, you should always keep in mind that the content published here still has to be of the highest quality, both for Google’s sake and your visitors’.
This brings us to the second topic, i.e., lead generation. Just about every good coming soon page will have incorporated a field where you visitors can subscribe to a newsletter or any other kind of a mailing list. This can be immensely important for your business because that way, you will start building a loyal customer base even before the launch.
In other words, your website will have customers (and internet traffic) right away. A good strategy for this can be to offer people some sort of an incentive to sign up – a coupon with a discount usually does the trick.
Finally, there’s the matter of communicating with your prospective visitors/clients. By creating a coming soon page, you will be able to tell them exactly when your website is ready to launch and how much work has been completed. This can help you generate hype about the whole thing, and it essentially tells people when to come and check everything out.
Also, this way, you can make sure people don’t see the actual website that is under construction, which can be a major turn off and create a fairly negative image of your business.
A professionally designed coming soon page, on the other hand, tells people they can rely on you to deliver what you promise even while you’re doing a WordPress update.
How to create a coming soon page
So, how do you go about creating a coming soon page, anyway? Well, two high-quality plugins are just perfect for the job: Under Construction and Minimal Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode. In the rest of this text, we will show you step by step how to set up a great coming soon page up in a matter of minutes, but what needs to be emphasized is the fact that both of these plugins can be used for free.
So, setting everything up can literally only benefit you. Let’s get started.
Under Construction
We will start with the Under Construction plugin, which is exceptionally easy to use. Just keep in mind, though, that these are WordPress plugins we’re talking about here, and you will need at least WordPress 4.7 to run them. That’s about the only technical requirement you need to worry about.
So, after downloading and installing the plugin, log into your admin account to get started. Click on the “Settings” button on the left side of your screen, and you will see that Under Construction is now available there, too. Click on it, and the plugin’s options will appear in front of you. As you will now be able to see, there are several categories of features you can modify.
The first thing you will want to do is make sure the Under Construction mode is actually on, and you can toggle this in the plugin’s main menu. One-click, and it will be activated. Next, you will want to choose a design for the page. There are plenty to choose from already built into the product, so you can just choose the one that fits your website best and move on.
After that, head to the content tab. This requires a bit more work, but nothing too difficult. It’s just that this is the place where you decide what your coming soon page will say, what its title will be, its meta description, etc. You may also want to add links to your social media profiles here so that your visitors can follow you there, too.
With these two steps, you have your basic coming soon page all set up, just don’t forget to click the “Save Changes” button when you’re done editing. You will also note a “Preview” button next to it, which allows you to check what you’ve created.
By default, you as admin will be whitelisted and will be taken to the actual site right away and won’t be taken to the coming soon page when you open your website.
However, you can change who is whitelisted in the “Access” tab, which is a great way to give carefully selected people an insight into what you’re doing. For example, your client or a subscriber can bypass the coming soon page this way and get a glimpse of what’s going on. As you can see, this is really not rocket science, and everything can easily be set up in a matter of minutes.
Minimal Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode
The process for setting up Minimal Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode is very similar. The first thing you need to do is to download and activate the plugin. Once again, you will go to the “Settings” button and see the plugin listed there. Next, you choose one of more about 170 different themes, and that can actually be a perfectly viable coming soon page right there.
However, for the best possible result, you may want to tweak that page, obviously. Once you log in as an admin and click on the plugin, you will see the things you can tweak on the left side of your screen. You have your SEO options, the aforementioned themes, and the Design button, among other things. Click that to design the page to look exactly how you want.
There’s a lot of elements to consider here, but everything is done through a very intuitive drag-and-drop interface, so you can design the page you want in literally a matter of minutes, even faster than that. It’s important to note that the plugin supports Gutenberg, Elementor, and Beaver Builder, so you can use those programs if they suit you better.
You can also add images to your background, and their number is hugely impressive because there are more than 100 million options to choose from. Add to that the fact that you can add various filters to them, and you can be sure you will create a unique coming soon page every single time.
Clicking on the “Autoresponders & Emailing Services” button will allow you to integrate the whole thing with things like Mailchimp and Zapier, and you can set that up in the drop-down menu that appears after clicking on the “Select Emailing/Integration System” button in this tab.
The “Access” tab allows you to create whitelists of IP addresses that can access the site you’re working on, but you can also create a unique link that you’ll send to your client (or anyone else you want to be able to check out your progress) by creating a URL in the Secret Access Link field.
But the most important feature of this plugin is the fact that you can remove any mention of the company behind the product and put in your brand’s name and logo instead. Just go to the dashboard and find the “Brands” button. Once you click that, you will see that you can create a whole branding package, which includes your logo, your colors, the text you want…
Anything related to your brand can be inserted here, making sure your visitors get to see your brand in the best possible light. Once you’re done, go to the “License” page and connect the brand package you’ve created to the license you have. A short resync later, and you’re all set.
So, while you can set a coming soon page with this plugin really quickly, you can also have a detailed approach to the whole process and make sure the page looks exactly the way you want. You can customize so many details, and the whole experience is so very enjoyable thanks to a very intuitive interface. You simply can’t go wrong with this product.
PRO Versions
As we said, the two aforementioned plugins can be used for free, and you certainly do get a lot of features with the free versions. However, each product also has its own PRO version you can use to expand your options.
Under Construction PRO Version
Under Construction PRO version, for example, will let you add affiliate links, create whitelists of IP addresses, provide you with universal autoresponder support, help you integrate Mailchimp, and much, much more. As a matter of fact, the list of the feature available is quite long, so there would be little point in enumerating them all here.
Just know that you have three premium packages to choose from if you want to subscribe on an annual basis, so if you think the PRO version of the Under Construction plugin is not for you, you can always take it up or down a notch. At the moment, you can even get yourself a lifetime-long license for the PRO version.
Minimal Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode PRO version
Some of the features included things like Google Maps and Progress Bar modules, advanced SEO analysis, the ability to disable double option, the ability to control multiple websites from a single dashboard, easy integration of various CRM platforms, and more.
Again, you have the option to choose which premium package you want, and once again, you have the option to get yourself a PRO version of Minimal Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode that will last you a lifetime for a very reasonable price. You can pay for it on an annual basis too, and if you’re in charge of multiple websites, you will want to pick up the Agency package.
All in all, the choice is up to you, but both of the plugins discussed here are exceptionally fine products, and you simply can’t go wrong with either of them.
Conclusion
Setting up a coming soon page should be a vital part of your preparations for your website’s launch. It will help you gather loyal followers and start building a community around your brand, not to mention that you will signal to Google (and other search engines) that it should be on the lookout for a new great site.
Creating a useful, productive page like that really isn’t a very demanding task because you have a couple of excellent plugins to help you with that. Under Construction and Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode are both very easy to use and offer a vast array of handy options.
Not to mention that you can customize your page to look pretty much however you want with them, thus showing your prospective clients that you’re a professional and can be relied upon.
Both plugins have excellent free versions, so you don’t have to make an investment if you’re launching a smaller project, but you will find the PRO version more than up to the task for the bigger tasks. And you can get lifetime licenses for them at a great price.
So, don’t waste your time while you’re building your website. You don’t have just to wait idly while work is being done. Create a quality coming soon page and make sure you have the best possible start in your new venture.
