Updated September 2026
Both put one screen in front of your site. They look the same, they are often the same plugin with a different toggle, and most guides treat them as a style choice. They are not. They send opposite instructions to Google, and the toggle you pick decides whether the page you just made gets indexed or quietly thrown away.
The short version: a coming soon page is real content that should be found, so it answers 200 OK. A maintenance page is a temporary outage that should not be indexed, so it answers 503 Service Unavailable and says when to come back. Everything else follows from that.
Which one you need
Coming soon — 200 OK
The thing behind it does not exist yet. There is nothing to come back to, because there was never anything there. The page itself is the product for now: it explains what is coming, and collects the emails of people who want to know when it lands.
Maintenance — 503 + Retry-After
The site exists and is temporarily down. Google already has those pages indexed and you want to keep them exactly as they are. You are asking the crawler to leave, remember what it had, and try again later.
What actually breaks
Neither failure announces itself. Both look completely fine in a browser — which is exactly why they survive for months.
The most common one, because plugins default to it. You publish a launch page, it answers 503, and Google reads that as “this address is broken, come back later”. It will not index the page, the emails you could have collected from search never arrive, and the launch page you spent an afternoon on is invisible for its entire life — which, by definition, is short.
The tell: The page has been up for weeks and Search Console shows no impressions at all, not low ones. Zero is a status-code problem, not a content problem.
The mirror image, and the more expensive of the two. Your indexed pages answer 200 with the splash screen behind them. Google crawls, finds the same short page at every URL, and updates its index accordingly — your product pages become one identical holding page. When you come back, the rankings do not come back with you.
The tell: After a maintenance window, several unrelated URLs suddenly show the same title in Search Console results.
Half-right, and easy to leave in place. The status is correct but there is no Retry-After header, so the crawler has no idea whether to come back in an hour or next week. It backs off on its own schedule, which is usually slower than yours, and the recovery after the outage takes longer than the outage did.
The tell: Crawl rate stays low for days after the site is back up.
Check yours in ten seconds
A browser renders a 503 and a 200 identically. Ask for the headers instead — the first line is the whole answer.
# The first line is the whole answer.
curl -sI https://yourdomain.com | head -n 1
# HTTP/2 200 → indexable. Right for a coming soon page.
# HTTP/2 503 → temporarily unavailable. Right for maintenance.
# On a 503, check it also says when to come back:
curl -sI https://yourdomain.com | grep -i retry-after
# retry-after: 3600 If a maintenance page answers 503, add Retry-After too — a number of seconds, or an HTTP date. Without it you have told Google the site is unavailable without ever saying for how long, and it has to guess when to return.
Doing it
Plugin toggles usually name the two modes explicitly. Elementor is one of the few that says which status code each one sends. If yours does not say, check with curl.
The WordPress methods →Password protection is neither of the two: it hides the shop behind a form and is not a signal you control. Worth knowing before you rely on it for a launch.
The Shopify options →You set the status in the server config, not in the HTML. A meta tag cannot change a status code — that is the mistake most template tutorials make.
The HTML route → The case the plugin comparisons never cover: there is no CMS to put a plugin into. Point the domain at a hosted coming soon page, collect emails while you build, and repoint it when the real site is ready. It answers 200 by default, because that is what a launch page should do.
Questions
Only if it answers the wrong status code, or if it stays up for months with nothing on it. A launch page returning 200, with a real description of what is coming and a working email field, is an ordinary indexable page — and often the first thing that ranks for a brand name.
Usually not. Noindex keeps the one page you want found out of search, which is the opposite of the point. Use it only if the page is a placeholder you would be embarrassed to have ranked — in which case the fix is a better page, not a tag.
A 503 is designed for hours, not weeks. Google tolerates a few days and then starts treating the URLs as genuinely gone. If the outage is going to last longer than that, you are not in maintenance any more — you are relaunching, and a 200 coming soon page is the honest signal.
No. Password protection returns whatever the platform decides, usually a 200 on a login screen, and gives you no control over the signal. It is a good way to hide work in progress from people and a bad way to communicate anything to a crawler.
You can, but almost nobody subscribes to an outage. The people who reach a maintenance page came for something specific and were interrupted. Save the email capture for a coming soon page, where signing up is the point rather than a consolation prize.