Magento under construction page

Follow these few simple steps to get your Magento Under Construction Page up and running. This has been tested on Magento 1.4x, but there is no reason why this shouldn’t work on earlier versions too. It should work on other CMS’s also.

Before you start, make a complete backup inc. DB

Step 1 - Create an under Construction HTML page

Create an index.html under construction page
Upload this page to your root magento directory
(you have already made that backup, right>?)

Step 2 - Update your .htaccess file

Add the following line to the top of your .htaccess file in the root directory of your magento installation

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Also, upload this file to your root magento directory
(rest assured if anything goes wrong, you’ve got that backup!)

This tells the system to use your index.html file before the index.php, this is essential, otherwise your site will show as usual.

Step 3 - Test your front end and continue working

Your frontend should now show the under construction / maintenance page.

To continue working on your site, simply navigate to your frontend and add /index.php
e.g.
www.yourdomainname.com - goes to the under construction HTML page
www.yourdomainname.com/index.php - goes to your website for development purposes

Once everything is backup and running, simply add a hash (#) to the command line in your htaccess file:
#DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Additional for those on dedicated IP

If you have your shop on a dedicated IP address, which to be honest most if not all shops should be. Then you will have the added benefit of locking down the whole site by updating your Admin section.

Navigate to Magento Admin > System > Configuration > Web >
Change your Base URL to your dedicated IP address

That way any deep page requests using the domain name simply forward to the IP root, i.e your under construction HTML page.