John – thanks for the swift response and explanation. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my Google indexing/ranking improves!
In hindsight, I guess I should have managed my maintenance mode better in order to keep my downtime to a minimum. That said, I am a business manager first and foremost (as opposed to a web developer or systems administrator) and didn’t have either the time or level of knowledge I would have liked.
May I suggest adding some notes to the plugin so that other people who are of a similar ‘ilk’ to myself (i.e. not especially technical) are aware of the dangers of leaving their website in maintenance mode for too long.
Many thanks.
