AI Summary
Do you want to hide your WordPress site until it’s ready to launch? Maybe you’re building a brand new site, or you want to keep your work private from the public while you redesign an existing one.
Either way, hiding your site gives you room to work without visitors stumbling onto half-finished or broken pages. It also protects your SEO, since you don’t want Google indexing placeholder content or error pages before you’re ready to go live.
In this guide, I’ll show you the easiest way to hide your WordPress site until it’s ready, and how to keep it private from the public while still letting your team or clients preview it. You can hide your whole site or just the specific pages you’re still working on.
Can I Take My WordPress Site Offline?
Yes, and the easiest way to do it is with SeedProd, one of the most popular coming soon and maintenance mode plugins for WordPress.
SeedProd lets you hide your entire site behind a coming soon page. It has an awesome landing page builder that you can use to make your own custom page designs. You can easily make:
- Coming soon pages: Use this setting to hide your WordPress site until it’s ready. This is sometimes called an ‘under construction page’.
- 404 pages: Make your own custom page that shows up if someone tries to visit a deleted page on your website.
- Maintenance mode pages: Design a page to display if you need to take your site offline for maintenance.
- Custom landing pages: Create your own beautiful distraction-free landing page forms for newsletter signups, webinars, and more.
Even better, lets you hide all of your site or just the specific posts and pages you need to work on. That means your visitors will never have to see broken or unfinished content.
You don’t have to move or delete your site to show a ‘coming soon’ page with SeedProd, and search engines will still see a valid page when they visit.
Even better, you can add a newsletter signup form so you can continue to get subscribers while your WordPress site is offline. You can read more about these features in our full SeedProd review.
Add a Contact Form to Your Coming Soon Page
How to Hide Your WordPress Site Until It’s Ready
Are you ready to start working on your site? I’ll walk you through the whole process step by step, from setting up WordPress to flipping your site into coming soon mode.
Let’s start by checking you have your hosting set up and ready.
Step 1: Set Up Your New WordPress Site
When you’re starting out with WordPress, you’ll first want to buy web hosting, and I recommend Bluehost.
With Bluehost, you get affordable WordPress hosting and a free domain name in one plan. It also lets you create a free business email address at your domain.
If you’re new to WordPress, Bluehost is a great option because it’ll automatically set up WordPress for you. For more help getting started, read this guide on how to start a WordPress blog.
Already running WordPress and just need to hide your existing site? Go ahead and skip to Step 2.
Now that your hosting account is set up, let’s install the SeedProd plugin to hide your WordPress site until it’s ready.
Step 2: Install the SeedProd Plugin
Let’s install the plugin you’ll use to hide your WordPress site until it’s ready.
First, head to the SeedProd website and grab your copy of the plugin. You can download the zip file from the Downloads tab in your SeedProd account.
Not sure what to do with the zip file? Check out how to install a WordPress plugin if you’ve never installed one before.
When you activate the plugin, go ahead and paste in your SeedProd license key. This unlocks all of the features in the Pro version, including the access controls you’ll use to hide your site.
Next, let’s create the coming soon page that will show up when visitors try to access your new site.
Step 3: Create Your Coming Soon Page in SeedProd
In this step, you’ll use the drag and drop builder to make a completely custom coming soon page.
SeedProd pages are totally separate from your WordPress theme, so you can try out different themes on the backend without affecting your coming soon page.
First, look to the left-hand side of the WordPress dashboard. To start making your page, click SeedProd » Pages.
At the top, you’ll see the different types of templates you can use in SeedProd:
- Coming Soon
- Maintenance Mode
- 404 Page
- Login Page
- Landing Page
To hide your WordPress site until it’s ready, go ahead and set up a Coming Soon page.
Now choose your favorite design from the templates and click it to open it full size. In this example, I’ll use the City Coming Soon Page template.
In the popup, type in a name for your page. SeedProd automatically creates the URL, but you can customize it here if you want.
Now you’re ready to customize your new page.
Step 4: Customize Your Coming Soon Page
Now you’re in the SeedProd page builder, with the elements you can drag onto your page on the left and a live preview on the right. You can click any part of the preview to edit it.
You can make a page that matches your new site, or create something totally unique.
SeedProd lets you add two types of content to your page, Blocks and Sections. You can access these using the tabs at the top left.
You can easily build your page using blocks for:
- Text
- Background images
- Forms
- Call-to-action buttons
- Countdown timers
- Social media links
- Videos
- RafflePress giveaways
- FAQs
- Progress bars
- And more
Just pick an item and drag it onto your page. When you click a block, you can tweak the colors and settings.
Let’s add a countdown timer so visitors know when the site will launch. You can do this without writing any HTML or PHP code.
First, scroll to the Advanced blocks and drag the Countdown timer onto your page.
Next, click the countdown block to open its settings.
Now use the settings on the left to choose a countdown style. You can also set the launch date for your website.
Next, remove the parts of the page you don’t need. You can delete any element by hovering over it and clicking the trash can.
Keep customizing your page until it’s ready to publish. Don’t forget to hit the green Save button at the top to save your progress.
Now let’s look at some of the settings you can tweak on your new WordPress coming soon page.
Step 5: Choose When to Show Your Coming Soon Page
This setting is where you decide exactly how private your site should be, and it’s where SeedProd pulls ahead of most coming soon plugins. Instead of a single on/off switch for the whole site, you get to control precisely which pages the public can and can’t see.
For now, you’ll probably want to hide your whole site until it’s ready. Down the road, you might only want to hide specific pages or posts you’re reworking, so this setting is worth getting familiar with for future updates.
To control when your coming soon page shows up, click Page Settings at the top of the SeedProd builder. Then click Access Control to open the settings.
Now scroll down to the Include/Exclude URLs section. This is where you tell SeedProd how much of your site to hide from the public.
Here’s what each access control setting does:
- Show on the Entire Website: This is the default, and it’s the one to choose if you want to make your whole WordPress site private until it’s ready. Anyone who tries to view any page on your site sees the coming soon page on the front end.
- Show on the Home Page Only: Use this to show your new page only on the homepage. All of your other pages and posts stay in public view.
- Include URLs: Use this if you want to hide only specific pages. For example, if you’re rewriting one page, you can hide just that page and leave everything else visible.
- Exclude URLs: This does the opposite of Include URLs. It hides your entire site except for the pages you specify, which is handy when you want to keep a few pages public while hiding the rest.
Hide Your Site From the Public but Allow Your Team In
If you’re building a site for a client or a friend, you’ll often want to keep it private from the public while still letting a few people see the real site to review your progress.
SeedProd makes this easy, letting you hide your WordPress site from everyone else while handing specific people a way past the coming soon page.
There are three ways to let someone bypass the coming soon page:
- Bypass URL: This is a secret URL that lets a visitor get past your coming soon page. You can share it with anyone who needs to see the site, and Bypass URL Expires controls how long they can view the site after using that link.
- Access by IP: If you know your client’s IP address, you can add it here so they never see the coming soon page.
- Access by Role: This lets logged-in WordPress users see the real site if they have a matching user role. For example, to let your content writers in, add the Editor role here if that’s how they’re set up.
Now is a good time to look through the rest of the coming soon page settings in case there’s anything else you want to tweak. All set? Click the green Save button at the top to save your settings.
Step 6: Hide Your WordPress Website
Your page is set up, so now you’re ready to hide your WordPress site until it’s ready.
To start, click the dropdown next to the Save button and select Publish.
Next, click See Live Page to preview the coming soon page exactly as your visitors will see it.
Then click the X in the top right corner to go back to the WordPress dashboard. The last step is to enable the page from the SeedProd » Pages menu.
Ready to hide your site? Click the switch under Coming Soon Mode so that it’s set to Active.
Your WordPress site is now hidden behind the coming soon page, and anyone who visits sees that page instead of your work in progress. When you’re ready to launch, you can switch Coming Soon Mode back off to make your site live again.
FAQs About Hiding Your WordPress Site Until It’s Ready
Here are a few common questions about how to hide your WordPress site until it’s ready and keep it private from the public while you work.
How do I make my WordPress site private until it’s ready?
The simplest way is to put up a coming soon page with SeedProd and set its access control to Show on the Entire Website. That keeps your whole site private from the public until you switch coming soon mode off, while you keep working in the WordPress dashboard as normal.
How do I hide my site from the public but let my team see it?
In your SeedProd page’s Access Control settings, use one of the bypass options. You can share a secret bypass URL, allow specific IP addresses, or give access to certain WordPress user roles like Editor. Everyone else sees the coming soon page, and the people you choose see the real site.
Does hiding my WordPress site hurt my SEO?
No, hiding your site the right way actually helps your SEO. SeedProd serves search engines a valid page instead of broken or half-finished content, so Google doesn’t index your site before it’s ready. Once you launch, it crawls your finished pages as normal.
Can’t I just use the built-in WordPress setting?
WordPress has a setting under Settings » Reading called Search engine visibility that discourages search engines from indexing your site. The catch is that it only asks search engines not to index you. It doesn’t hide anything, so any visitor with your URL still sees your unfinished site. To actually hide your site you need a coming soon page like SeedProd, or you can password protect your WordPress site.
How do I unhide my WordPress site and go live?
When your site is ready, go to SeedProd » Pages and switch Coming Soon Mode off. Your site becomes visible to the public right away, and visitors see your finished pages instead of the coming soon page.
Next, Add a Contact Form to Your Coming Soon Page
You can add a contact form right to your coming soon page so people can still reach you while your WordPress site is hidden, and you don’t miss any leads during the wait.
To start, follow our guide to creating a simple contact form that you can embed on your SeedProd page. If you’re not sure which form builder to use on your new website, our guide to WPForms Lite vs Contact Form 7 will help you decide.
Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.
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