WordPress Event Ticketing

You've got your hosting all sorted and found the dream domain name. You start building your website, but then it hits you like a ton of bricks when you realize people are visiting your website that's in progress! It looks horrible, has a bunch of issues and hardly any of the functionality. Luckily that's where coming soon themes and plugins come in. Most coming soon themes and plugins soon allow you to continue working on your site with another theme even when activated so that once you are logged in you see the mess and the visitors see a nice coming soon page.

What should you look for in a coming soon solution?

One of the most important aspects of any coming soon plugin or theme is that they include some form of countdown timer that visitors can keep coming back and checking along with a subscription form so people interested in your website can subscribe to get updates. Without these two pieces of functionality, having a coming soon page would be more or less pointless. Another feature you'll want to look out for is a bypass feature, where the full site with a theme of your choosing is still available to admins and other users with permissions logged in. This is one of the many features of the SeedProd plugin mentioned below.

You also might want to make sure the coming soon page or theme is responsive-ready out the box and has built in social integrations and sharing capabilities. It's important if you want this functionality that the coming soon solution you choose has it built in. Quite often with coming soon plugins/themes they can't be used in conjunction with other functionality of your website such as social sharing plugins etc.

In no particular order lets take a look at five great coming soon plugins and themes.

1. SeedProd Coming Soon - $79 (unlimited sites)

This coming soon and maintenance mode plugin for WordPress is one of the most fully featured offerings currently available on the market with a wide range of features including Email integrations, add an email opt-in to your coming soon page and start collecting leads for marketing before you've even launched!

Countdown and progress trackers are built in to let your visitors follow along with what's happening with your site.

Social sharing and profile integration; get your name out there on the world's most popular social platforms before you've even launched. Also, the plugin is both responsive and retina ready which is always a welcoming feature.

2. Launchpad - Free

Launchpad is a completely free coming soon and maintenance mode plugin by Obox themes (the team behind the Layers framework). For a free plugin, launchpad is packed with functionality including custom fonts with built in Adobe Typekit integration, custom backgrounds, email campaign integration and even WooCommerce compatibility. While it may not be quite as full featured as the premium plugin by SeedProd. Launchpad is an excellent choice for your coming soon page.

3. My Countdown - $34 (single site)

Mycountdown is a theme by TeslaThemes for coming soon pages. Offering multiple colors, a built-in jQuery countdown and in an interesting piece of functionality newsletter signup functionality that saves/stores email addresses in a .txt file. This allows you to skip needing a provider like Mailchimp straight away; instead, you can get involved in building your site and be confident in the fact you have a txt file with all your subscribers in for upload to an email marketing platform at a later date.

If you want a creative, impactful coming soon page, Mycountdown could be the theme for you.

The main negative with Mycountdown is that because it's on ThemeForest the price is for a single site license. If you happen to be a developer building sites for multiple clients you'd most probably be better off going with SeedProd unless you actually prefer the look of MyCountdown.

4. Caelus - $34 (single site)

Caelus is a feature packed coming soon theme with both coming soon and landing page versions, two color schemes and built in MailChimp support. Fully responsive out the box with a jQuery countdown timer, Twitter feed integration and social icon support.

Unlike other coming soon/landing page themes, you build the page by using widgets.

There are eight widgets built into the theme that can be used for creating your coming soon or landing page. Just like with Mycountdown as Caelus is on ThemeForest it's again a single site license which means every time you want to use it, it'll cost you $34.

5. Coming Soon And Maintenance Mode - Freemium

Coming soon and maintenance mode is a freemium plugin with a free version available on WordPress.org's plugin repository and a premium version available on the developer's website. The free version is feature packed with a large list of functionality available out of the box, including being fully responsive, custom logos, backgrounds, and colors. SEO friendly out the box, social feed integration, etc.

The Pro version comes with an extra range of features including Background sliders, YouTube background support, subscription forms, multiple different countdown designs, 39 animation variations for the counter timer, page specific exclusions and much much more. The pro version is available from the plugin developer here. The most expensive version is just $50 for all features, premium support and unlimited websites making it a great value proposition.

Conclusion

Having a coming soon page can help you get early traction with your website even when it's not ready and still in active development. Have you used any of the solutions mentioned in this article? Maybe you've found a great theme or plugin that isn't referred to above? Let us know in the comments below.