Is there a way to set a page to show clients while the sitecore site restarts?

Question

A sitecore restart takes anywhere from 2-5 minutes. Many other CMSes have a screen show to clients while the restart is taking effect. Is there any way to do this in sitecore?

Answer 1

There is nothing out of the box with Sitecore that provides this. What you are needing is a feature built right into IIS!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/configuration/system.webserver/applicationinitialization/

Here is an example configuration from the article describing the use of a default page during startup.

<system.webServer>
   <applicationInitialization
      doAppInitAfterRestart="true"
      skipManagedModules="true"
      remapManagedRequestsTo="filename.htm">
      <add initializationPage="/default.aspx" hostName="myhost"/>
   </applicationInitialization>
</system.webServer>