Offair – Branded Error Pages

When WordPress breaks, it shows screens of its own that no theme and no plugin can style, because they appear before any of them is loaded:

• Error establishing a database connection, when the database is unreachable.
• Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance, while WordPress installs updates.
• There has been a critical error on this website, after a fatal PHP error.

Offair replaces these three screens with a calm page in your colors, with your logo and your words, and makes them answer with the right HTTP status so that search engines and caches treat the outage as temporary.

It also keeps a history of the outages your visitors ran into, and can email you when the database goes down, then again once the site is back.

This is not a maintenance mode or coming soon plugin. It does not take your site offline and it does not add a page you switch on. It only covers the moments when WordPress itself cannot serve your site.

How it works

WordPress looks for three special files in wp-content, called drop-ins: db-error.php, maintenance.php and php-error.php. It loads them itself, before any plugin, which is the only way to show something when the database is down.

The plugin copies one static file shipped in its own folder (dropins/drop-in.php) under these three names. No code is generated. The content of the pages (texts, colors, logo) is saved as a JSON file in wp-content/uploads/offair/, and the drop-in reads it when a page has to be shown. What visitors must not see, such as the alert recipient and the history, is kept next to it in a private folder whose name cannot be guessed, with an .htaccess file that refuses web access on Apache and LiteSpeed. On Nginx, see the FAQ.

What you get

• Four layouts for the three screens: card, minimal, two columns or banner. Each shows the logo, the site name, the title, the message, a retry button and an incident line with the local time.
• Automatic dark mode: the pages follow the light or dark setting of the device of the visitor, with an optional logo for dark backgrounds. They can also stay always light or always dark.
• Your logo and colors, detected from the theme, the site icon and Elementor global colors when available, editable at any time.
• Texts in the language of the site until you customize them. Translations included: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Polish, Russian and Japanese.
• Correct HTTP answers: 503 with a Retry-After header for the database and update pages, 503 or 500 for PHP errors (your choice), plus no-cache headers so no cache ever keeps an error page.
• No external dependency: system fonts, logo embedded in the content file, nothing loaded from the network.
• A live preview beside the settings, rendered by the drop-in itself, exactly as visitors will see it. It follows what you type, and nothing is saved or written to your site until you save.
• An email alert when the database goes down, off by default. The page itself sends it while WordPress cannot run, and WordPress sends a report once the site is back, with the duration of the outage. A test button shows whether your host delivers it.
• A history of the outages, under Tools, Outage history: the date, the page and the HTTP status, recorded once a minute at most. For a PHP error, the error itself too: its message, file and line, which usually name the plugin or theme in cause. Nothing about your visitors is recorded.
• A dashboard widget with the outages of the last 30 days, off by default, shown only to the roles you choose. Without it, a notice on the dashboard tells administrators about a database outage they missed.
• Theme templates: a theme can design any of the three pages itself, with the texts, colors and logo from the settings.
• A status box, a Site Health test and WP-CLI commands.
• Clean removal: the drop-ins are removed when the plugin is deactivated, and everything is removed when it is uninstalled.

The plugin never replaces a db-error.php, maintenance.php or php-error.php it did not add itself. If one already exists, it tells you and waits for your decision.

Works with MainWP

If you manage your sites with MainWP, the free Offair for MainWP extension shows in your MainWP Dashboard the outages your visitors ran into on all your sites, in one place. An uptime monitor checks your sites from the outside every few minutes. Offair sees the short database outages and the fatal errors on a single page that such checks miss.

Nothing else is needed on the sites: when MainWP Child is active, Offair adds its outages to the regular MainWP synchronization, and only when the dashboard asks for it. The state of the pages already reaches MainWP through the Site Health test.

Developers

• offair_settings filters the settings before the page content is built.
• offair_data filters the page content before it is saved for the drop-in.
• offair_incident_resolved fires once a database outage is over, with the times of the first and last pages shown.
• Theme templates: offair/db-error.php, offair/maintenance.php and offair/php-error.php in the active theme or its parent. The variable they receive is described in the FAQ, under Can my theme design the pages?
• WP-CLI: wp offair status, generate [--force], remove [--force], preview <db|maintenance|php>, history.

About

Offair is developed and maintained by Nolidev, a WordPress studio in Vannes, France, which uses it on the sites it looks after.