There is a cool feature from Laravel called Maintenance Mode that allows developer to simply take down the website and apply necessary updates and changes. You can invoke in the command prompt

php artisan down

And your application will put into maintenance mode.

Once you are done with your updates then you can put it on again by simply invoking.

php artisan up

this will enable your application as normal with all your changes and updates.

By default if you apply a php artisan down, and apply changes to your application, you can’t test if your updates works fine unless you put you application up again. But then, if you put your application online again and you have some problem with the updates, your users might add mess which will result to more complicated problems.