How to change the Offline Message in Joomla 3.1

site-offline-message

When you set your Joomla 3.0 site to be in offline mode, the following message by default is shown to users:

This site is down for maintenance.
Please check back again soon.

In this Joomla 3.0 tutorial, we’ll show you how to change this offline message.

To change your Joomla 3.0 maintenance mode message:

  1. Log into your /administrator dashboard for Joomla 3.0
  2. In the left menu, click the Global Configuration link
  3. Ensure you are on the Site tab by clicking Site
  4. Under the Site Settings header, find the Custom Message setting. By default, it is set to:
    This site is down for maintenance.<br /> Please check back again soon.

    As you can see based upon the use of <br />, HTML code is allowed in the Custom Message.

    Change your Custom Message and then click Save in the top left of the page.

    In our testing, we changed our offline message to:

    <p>This site is currently in offline mode.</p>
    <p>We apologize for any inconvenience.</p>

    After saving this setting, you can see in the screenshot below how this changed our offline page:
    after-custom-message-has-been-set

Was this article helpful? Join the conversation!