Store Vacation Mode

Overview

Store Vacation Mode lets you temporarily close a WooCommerce store for holidays, maintenance, or restocking without hiding it. Your pages stay online and fully indexable with normal HTTP 200 responses (SEO safe), but purchasing is disabled and a customizable notice tells customers when the store reopens. You can close the store instantly with a manual switch or schedule it between two dates in the site timezone, with no cron jobs, because the open/closed status is computed live on every request. A live status card, a customizable banner, and an admin bar badge keep you and your team informed.

Installation

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Upload the store-vacation-mode folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Vacation Mode to configure

The master switch (Enable Plugin) is off by default, so activating the plugin does not close your store until you enable it.

Requirements

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WordPress 6.4 or higher
WooCommerce 9.0 or higher
PHP 7.4 or higher

Settings

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Access settings at WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Vacation Mode (admin.php?page=wc-settings&tab=advanced&section=vacation-mode). The settings page is a React app organized into three tabs.

General

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Setting	Description	Default
Store Status	Live status card computed from the manual switch and the schedule. Shows OPEN or CLOSED, the reason, and the next scheduled change. Read-only; refreshed on save.	n/a
Enable Plugin	Master switch. When disabled, no vacation mode features, hooks, or logic are active at all.	Disabled (`no`)
Vacation mode active	Manual switch. When on, the store is closed immediately, regardless of the schedule, until switched off.	Off (`no`)
Enable schedule	When enabled, the store closes between the start and end dates below.	Off (`no`)
Start date	Datetime (site timezone) when the scheduled closure begins. Leave empty to close from now.	Empty (`''`)
End date	Datetime (site timezone) when the scheduled closure ends. Leave empty to stay closed until reopened manually. Also feeds the `{reopen_date}` placeholder.	Empty (`''`)

Message

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Setting	Description	Default
Notice text	The message shown to customers while the store is closed. Supports the `{reopen_date}` placeholder and basic HTML.	`We are currently on vacation. Orders will resume on {reopen_date}.`
Notice position	Where the notice appears: `top_bar` (site-wide top bar), `before_shop` (before shop, cart, and checkout content), or `both`.	`both`
Background color	Banner and inline notice background color.	`#b91c1c`
Text color	Banner and inline notice text color.	`#ffffff`

Behavior

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Setting	Description	Default
Disable purchasing	Makes products non-purchasable, removes add-to-cart buttons, and blocks checkout while the store is closed. Existing carts are kept but cannot be checked out.	Enabled (`yes`)
Hide prices	Also hides product prices while the store is closed.	Disabled (`no`)
Show admin bar badge	Shows a red “Vacation Mode ON” badge in the admin bar (for users who can manage WooCommerce) while the store is closed, linking to this settings page.	Enabled (`yes`)

All settings are stored together in a single svm_settings option.

How It Works

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Turn on the Enable Plugin master switch in the General tab.
Close the store either immediately (turn on Vacation mode active) or on a schedule (enable the schedule and set dates).
While the store is closed, products are made non-purchasable, add-to-cart buttons are removed, checkout is blocked, and the vacation notice is shown according to its position.
Pages continue to return HTTP 200 and stay indexable throughout; nothing is redirected to a maintenance page.
Reopen by switching off the manual switch or letting the scheduled window end; the store returns to normal on the next page load.

Notice placeholder

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The notice text supports a single {reopen_date} placeholder. When the schedule is enabled and an end date is set, the placeholder is replaced with the end date formatted using the site date format. When there is no end date, the placeholder is removed along with a leading preposition (on, by, from, until, after) and any leftover punctuation spacing is cleaned up, so the sentence still reads correctly.

The is_store_closed Logic

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The core of the plugin is SVM_Vacation::is_store_closed(). The store is considered closed only when:

The Enable Plugin master switch is on (enabled === 'yes'), AND
Either:

The manual switch is on (vacation_active === 'yes'), in which case the store is closed immediately; OR
The schedule is enabled (schedule_enabled === 'yes') AND the current time falls within the configured window.

The scheduled window is evaluated by is_within_schedule() using current_datetime() (WordPress site timezone):

An empty start date means “from now” (no lower bound).
An empty end date means “until manually reopened” (no upper bound).
The store is closed when the current time is at or after the start date (if set) and at or before the end date (if set).

Dates are parsed from the YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM format into a DateTimeImmutable in the site timezone (wp_timezone()). Because the status is computed live on each request, there are no WP-Cron events involved and scheduled transitions happen exactly on time.

SVM_Vacation::get_status() returns a structured status (is_closed, human-readable reason, current time, and next scheduled change) that powers the live status card and the /status REST endpoint.

Frontend Behavior While Closed

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All frontend behavior is registered by SVM_Frontend only when the store is closed:

Disable purchasing (when enabled): filters woocommerce_is_purchasable and woocommerce_variation_is_purchasable to return false (which also blocks Store API add-to-cart), removes the loop add-to-cart link, redirects the checkout page to the cart with the notice, and rejects classic woocommerce_checkout_process submissions.
Hide prices (when enabled): filters woocommerce_get_price_html to return an empty string.
Notices: renders a site-wide top banner (on wp_body_open, with a wp_footer fallback) and/or an inline notice before shop, cart, and checkout content, depending on the notice position. Both use the configured background and text colors.

Developer Hooks

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The plugin exposes two filters:

Hook	Type	Description
`svm_is_store_closed`	filter	Filter the boolean result of whether the store is currently closed. Params: `$closed` (bool).
`svm_vacation_notice_text`	filter	Filter the customer notice text after `{reopen_date}` replacement. Params: `$text` (string), `$settings` (array).

REST API

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Namespace: svm/v1. All routes require the manage_woocommerce capability.

Route	Methods	Description
`/settings`	GET, POST	Get or update plugin settings
`/status`	GET	Get the current live store status (is_closed, reason, now, next_change)

HPOS Compatibility

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Store Vacation Mode declares full compatibility with WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) and Cart/Checkout Blocks via FeaturesUtil::declare_compatibility for custom_order_tables and cart_checkout_blocks.