Marketing
LightStart
Export the Emails from Your LightStart Coming Soon Page with AI
Pull every email your LightStart coming soon page collected into a CSV for your email service.
Works with AI · Verified on v2.6.24
Run Maintenance Mode with AI
Connect LightStart (formerly WP Maintenance Mode) to Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI assistant with WPVibe. Take your site offline with a page that says when you are back, let a client through, keep a page open and bring the site back online, by asking in plain English.
400,000+ active installs 3 verified abilities Last verified Oct 24, 2026
What your AI can do with LightStart
One connection gives your assistant structured, permission-checked access to the whole site.
Go offline safely
Write a maintenance page with when you are back, dry-run the switch, then turn it on with your yes.
Come back online
Turn maintenance mode off and check what visitors really see.
Let someone through
A client or teammate past the maintenance page by role or IP address, existing rules kept.
Keep a page open
Leave a contact or landing page open, with a check of other pages, posts and products the rule would also open.
Subscriber export
Every email the coming soon page collected, as CSV.
Things to ask
Paste any of these into Claude or ChatGPT once LightStart is connected.
“Put my site in maintenance mode until Thursday 9 am while I move hosts.”
“Is my site still in maintenance mode? If so, bring it back online.”
“Let my client see the site during maintenance; she logs in as an editor.”
“Keep our contact page open while the rest of the site is in maintenance.”
“Export everyone who subscribed on my coming soon page.”
Up and running in three steps
1
Install WPVibe
Add the free WPVibe plugin from WordPress.org to the site running LightStart.
2
Connect your AI
Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and more. One click to authorize, and no passwords ever go in the chat.
3
Ask in plain English
“Put my site in maintenance mode until Thursday 9 am while I move hosts.”
Verified LightStart recipes
Copy-paste playbooks, each one tested on a live LightStart install before it ships.
Maintenance
LightStart
Keep a Page Open During Maintenance with LightStart and AI
Leave your contact or landing page open while LightStart shows everyone else the maintenance page.
Maintenance
LightStart
Let Someone See Your Site During Maintenance with LightStart and AI
Let a client or teammate past LightStart's maintenance page by role or IP address, without dropping the rules already there.
Maintenance
LightStart
Bring Your Site Back Online with LightStart and AI
Your AI checks what visitors see, turns LightStart's maintenance mode off with your yes and proves the site is back.
Maintenance
LightStart
Take Your Site Offline for Maintenance with LightStart and AI
Your AI writes a maintenance page with when you will be back, switches LightStart on with your yes and checks what visitors see.
Every LightStart ability
LightStart registers these with the WordPress Abilities API under the lightstart namespace. Your AI finds them with discover_abilities and calls them with run_ability. WPVibe asks for your approval only when an ability is marked destructive and deletes something or runs code; everything else runs as soon as your AI calls it. Verified means we ran it on a live install of v2.6.24. Registered means a fresh install of v2.6.24 ships it and we have not run it yet.
Requires LightStart 2.6.24 or newer on WordPress 6.9 or newer, and an administrator account. The abilities are on as soon as the plugin is active. Choosing your own page as the maintenance page needs LightStart's block-based maintenance page (the default on new installs); with the classic screen the tools cannot choose a page; on and off, roles, the exclude list and bots still work. Tested on LightStart 2.6.24 (free) with WordPress 7.1.3.
| Ability | What it does | Access | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Read maintenance mode lightstart/get-mode
|
Whether maintenance mode is on, the page visitors get, and who gets through: roles, the exclude list and search engine bots. | Read | Verified |
|
Set maintenance mode lightstart/set-mode
|
Turns maintenance mode on or off and changes the chosen page, the roles that get through, the exclude list and the bot setting. | Write | Verified |
|
List subscribers lightstart/list-subscribers
|
The email addresses the maintenance or coming soon page collected, newest first, up to 100 a page. | Read | Verified |
What we learned testing it
Behavior the ability descriptions do not mention.
- Every change through LightStart's set-mode ability (on, off, roles, the exclude list, bots) runs without WPVibe's approval page. The recipes run LightStart's own dry run first, show you the result and wait for your yes.
- The exclude list and the two role lists are each replaced whole whenever they are sent. Send only the new entry and the others are gone; the recipes always send the full list.
- An exclude entry opens every address that contains it, and every visitor whose IP address contains it. In our test, contact also opened search results for contact; /contact/ with both slashes did not.
- In our test, clearing the chosen page (page 0) and then turning maintenance mode on sent visitors into an endless redirect. The recipes never send page 0.
- With a page chosen, the home page shows it with a 503 code (temporarily unavailable, come back later) and every other address sends visitors to the home page. A private page is published while the mode is on and goes back to private after.
- Administrators always get past the maintenance page, so check as a visitor: the recipes fetch your pages logged out, and a private window works too.
- Site and dashboard access are separate: an editor let through to the site was still sent away from the dashboard, and the other way round.
- Let search engine bots through means Google, Bing and Yahoo (and some old crawlers) read the real site. Others, such as DuckDuckBot, YandexBot and Applebot, and AI crawlers such as GPTBot, get the maintenance page (GPTBot did in our test).
- Maintenance mode is a notice for visitors, not a lock: pages can still be reached in other ways (in our test, adding ?login to an address showed the real page). To keep content private, use private or draft status.
- The design, the countdown, the subscribe form and the built-in maintenance screen's text are not reachable through LightStart's abilities; change them in LightStart's settings. The text of a page you chose is a normal page, which the AI can write.
Verified, and kept that way
Works with AI is WPVibe’s verification program. Every ability marked verified was run on a live LightStart install, and we rescan WordPress.org weekly so a release that adds or removes abilities shows up here before it surprises you.
Learn more about LightStart at wpmaintenancemode.com.