Every website has to perform maintenance at some point or another. Whether it’s just to upgrade a portion of the site or because of some problem with the site, it’s an inevitable fact of website ownership. And in many cases, maintenance requires taking your site offline for at least a few minutes.

So what should you do if your site is going to be down for maintenance? You don’t want users coming to a 404 or other error page. And hopefully you’d like to encourage them to come back to your site sooner rather than later, right? If that’s the case, you’ll need to build a custom maintenance page. Below we present a list of best practices to building effective maintenance pages that will help keep your visitors, whether new or returning, happy.

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

• 404 Error Pages
• 404 Error Pages: Reloaded
• 404 Error Pages: One More Time

1. Keep you maintenance pages simple and useful.

The entire point of a maintenance page is to let visitors know that your site is still around and that the maintenance is only temporary. It doesn’t need to do anything beyond that. Make sure it’s immediately apparent what your page is about and provides your visitors with the information they’re interested in.

Another useful function for simple maintenance pages is to include your maintenance message in multiple languages. The Web is global, and while many of your visitors are likely to speak at least some English, providing multiple languages is helpful. Just be wary of using online translators, as sometimes they’re less-than-accurate. The last thing you want your maintenance page to do is further confuse people, or worse â