Adding a Coming Soon! page to WordPress is surprisingly easy for website designers of all levels, there are a few ways to do it of course but here are two extremely simple and straight forward ways to ensure your WordPress website has a proper greeting page.

Theme Switcher Reloaded

A super cool, extremely easy way to create a Coming Soon! page for WordPress is to install the Theme Switcher Reloaded plugin and simply add a second theme to your install! Your second theme only needs a few things, I’ve included a free bare bones theme for you to use as your Coming Soon page, so all you need to do is:

1. Download, install and activate the Coming Soon theme
2. Download and install and activate Theme Switcher Reloaded

Now that the general public can only see the Coming Soon! page, you’re free to add your second (real) theme and activate it using the Theme Switcher Reloaded plugin. Once you’ve added it, visit your homepage using the ?wptheme=[yourthemedirectoryname] option to view the working theme. Remember you have to be logged into the backend to see it!

Adding a Template to Your Existing Theme

If you don’t want to go to the trouble of installing the Theme Switcher plugin, you could also add a special page template to your directory with the following content:

[source lang="php"]

<?php
/**
 * @package WordPress
 * @subpackage Default_Theme
 */
/*

Template Name: Coming Soon
*/
echo "Coming Soon!";
?>
[/source]
Of course, you will then have to add a new Page to your website, make it the default homepage and change the theme. This option works well but causes the homepage of the site to always default back to a coming soon page, even for the developers. Tim has an article with detailed instructions on it here.

By the way, if you think a Coming Soon! page has to be boring, think again! Check out these great Coming Soon pages at 25 Examples of Cool Coming Soon Page Designs – Part II