If you are building your site on a live hosting account, you really don’t want people visiting your half completed website and getting a bad impression. Instead, you want it look something like this:
The Ultimate Coming Soon WordPress plugin by Seedprod solves this problem by creating a landing page that hides your entire website. Visitors that come to your site will see one page that you can configure as a landing page, asking them to opt-in to your email list.
Here’s the brilliant part; once you log into your site with your username and password, you can see the entire site as you are building it. The landing page is invisible to you. This can be difficult to wrap your mind around at first, but once you see the plugin in action you’ll have no problem working with it.
The free version of Ultimate Coming Soon Page allows you to collect emails and place them into a database, or have visitors subscribe to your RSS feed. The paid version of this plugin lets you push the email signups directly into your email list for most popular services such as MailChimp or AWeber.
Is the Paid Version of Ultimate Coming Soon Really Worth It?
I’ve bought the pro version of some plugins and been very disappointed in the “advanced features”. What you really want me to tell you is “Is the pro version worth it?”
In short, yes. The paid version does so many things that I don’t have enough space to list them here. It gives more formatting options for the landing page such as adding an image slideshow, an image background, or video. It allows you to open up specific pages on the site to visitors based on their IP address. It has built in social sharing and search engine optimization. And the list goes on and on…
When you’re ready to launch the site, your landing page can stick around and be used as a true landing page. So all of that work you did to configure it doesn’t go to waste.
If you are developing your site on a live web hosting account (and most of us are) I highly recommend using this plugin.
Plugin Stats
Name: Ultimate Coming Soon Page
Developer: Seedprod
Purpose: A landing page that hides your incomplete website from visitors while building your email list.
Versions: Free or Paid
WordPress.org Page: http://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-coming-soon-page/Developer
Developer Page: http://www.seedprod.com/