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.

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 you get

• One design for the three screens: centered card, logo, site name, title, message, retry button and an incident line with the local time.
• 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. French translation included.
• 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 of each page, rendered by the drop-in itself, exactly as visitors will see it.
• 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.

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.
• WP-CLI: wp offair status, generate [--force], remove [--force], preview <db|maintenance|php>.