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# How to Enable & Disable Maintenance Mode in Magento

### Why Do We Need Maintenance Mode?
The reason why you need to set your Magento online store in maintenance mode is to inform your visitors that you're currently working on your website until it's ready to resume its operation. 

Once your store is ready, then you can disable the maintenance mode.

Here's how you can **enable** and **disable** maintenance mode:

1. To put a Magento site in maintenance mode, you need to create an empty _.maintenance.flag_ file and upload it to the **/var** folder of your site. 

Here's an example on how we create _.maintenance.flag_ file and insert it into /var folder via File Manager.

![](https://storage.crisp.chat/users/helpdesk/website/30c43b4318b81000/step-1-maintenance-file_1vd1j0.png)

|| Make sure not to miss the dot in front of the filename. 

2. Enter your Magento store full website address on your browser and your web site will look like this:
![](https://storage.crisp.chat/users/helpdesk/website/30c43b4318b81000/step-2-unavailable_1569yhy.png)


|| NOTE: Both front end and admin dashboard cannot be accessed when using this method

3. To exclude all user access **EXCEPT** the administrator, you need to create a file called _.maintenance.ip_ and insert the ip address belonging to the administrator. By doing so, only the administrator can view and edit the website. Make sure to upload it into the same **/var** folder.

In other words, only visitor visited from __that same IP address__, the website will not show the maintenance page.


|| NOTE: If you cannot locate both .maintenance.ip and .maintenance.flag files using File Manager, use Filezilla instead

4. Once you have performed the necessary updates and decided it's time to disable maintenance mode, you can just remove both the **.maintenance.flag** and **.maintenance.ip** files using **FileZilla**.