Power Pages: Stop using the default maintenance mode page!

There are times when you need to do some work on your Microsoft Dataverse backend that could affect users and visitors to your Power Pages website. Things like a data migration, solution imports, or enabling new features. To ensure your visitors won’t get timeouts or weird error messages, a good practice is the put the Power Pages website into maintenance mode.

Check out the video version of this post here:

This will display the standard “website under maintenance” screen.

However, this provides no information to the visitors when the site will be back up or what is going on. This doesn’t provide for a great customer experience!

Custom maintenance page to the rescue

When configuring the maintenance page, you have the option to point to a custom page URL:

There are a few caveats to this approach.

• You can’t use webpage from the same Power Pages site going under maintenance.
• Using another Power Pages site requires additional security configuration.

So you could add a page to a different content management system or website in your organization. However, if you don’t have another platform or the time to set one up, a super simple solution is to create a simple HTML web page and host it on a Azure storage static websites. If you lack web design and development skills, then you can use your favourite AI chat tool to create one for you!

Set up an Azure storage static website

You will need an Azure subscription and access to the Azure admin portal.

Login to Azure and choose to create a new resource. Search for storage account and select the storage account provided by Microsoft.

Select your Azure subscription, select or create a new resource group, give the storage account a meaningful name and select a region ideally close to where your Power Pages site is located.

Select Review + create and choose either defaults or what works best in your situation.

Once the storage account is created, from the Data management section, select Static website and flip the button so it is enabled.

Use index.html as the document name and 404.html as the error document page. Select Save.

You will then get the primary endpoint, this will be the URL that you will use in the custom page URL for your maintenance page. Or you can get a vanity URL for the site as well (beyond scope of this post).

In the Data storage section, select Containers and you should see a $logs and $web folders.

Select the $web folder, this is where you will upload your custom maintenance page.

Keep this page/tab open.

Create static page

You can create your maintenance static page any way you want, but if you have Microsoft 365 Copilot it can get inspiration from your existing assets (if they exist within your corporate tenant).

Use Copilot to generate a static page. Here is the prompt I used:

Create an HTML file indicating that the website is under maintenance and will be back up on Saturday at 9am. Use corporate branding standards.

You can modify this as per your own requirements or upload supporting assets.

Copilot should generate a file that you can download.

You may need to rename the downloaded file to index.html (or ask Copilot to do it).

Return to Azure and upload this file to the static storage.

Once this is done, you can take the URL copied earlier and use that when enabling maintenance mode in Power Pages using the Power Platform Admin Center.

Navigate to your Power Pages website and you should now have a much more informative maintenance mode page for your website.

When the maintenance is done, make sure to take the site out of maintenance mode.

Summary

Information is power, and giving your site visitors additional information about when the site will be available goes a long way in managing expectations.

Nick Doelman is a Microsoft MVP, podcaster, trainer, public speaker, and competitive Powerlifter. Follow Nick on X at @readyxrm or LinkedIN, and now; Bluesky.

Need Power Platform expertise or training? Check out Nick’s website for more details.

Listen or watch the the Power Platform Boost podcast with Nick and co-host Ulrikke Akerbæk every second week for news and updates from the Power Platform community.

Original Post https://readyxrm.blog/2025/08/13/power-pages-stop-using-the-default-maintenance-mode-page/