[WooCommerce] Testing using WP Maintenance Mode

When upgrading or launching Autoship Cloud on your live site, we strongly suggest placing your site in "maintenance mode" using a plugin like WP Maintenance Mode.

Maintenance mode is a workflow that disables normal website visitors from viewing your site and placing orders while still enabling site administrators to work on the site and allowing integrations to function.

We suggest the WP Maintenance Mode plugin specifically because it enables integrations using the WooCommerce API to connect while the site is in maintenance mode and this will enable administrators to test Autoship Cloud and Scheduled Orders before customers can visit the site.

This is especially useful for customers upgrading from WC Autoship to Autoship Cloud.  Here is the basic process for how to use WP Maintenance Mode during an upgrade on your production/live website:

1. Login to the Wordpress Admin of your production/live website
2. Install + Activate WP Maintenance Mode and follow instructions to enable maintenance mode on your site including:
   1. Set Maintenance Mode to Activated
   2. add "wp-json" to the Exclude values (to exclude this URL)
   3. click "update"
3. Create a backup of you production/live website and database
   ** this is so you can restore the backup in case there is an issue upgrading
4. Follow instructions to upgrade WC Autoship to Autoship Cloud
5. Verify the upgrade completed successfully and complete testing
6. When everything is successfully completed and tested, disable maintenance mode