Unpublish WordPress Site. Regardless of the type of blog you run, you might want to temporarily close your website. It could be an evolving website that users shouldn’t see or a broken website that is set up in maintenance mode. Whatever the reasons, you can close your WordPress site using several methods.
Moreover, unpublishing your site (but not deleting it) can be useful when you need to make changes or updates, and you don’t want what you’re doing to be publicly visible while making sure everything works correctly. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to turn the entire website into design mode. Let’s discover a few different options that keep WordPress content idle.
If your site is hosted on WordPress.com When your website is hosted on WordPress.com, the first step is to log in and go to My Sites and choose the site you work with.
In the sidebar, go to Manage > Settings and scroll down to Privacy. You’ll see the “Coming Soon”, “Public” and “Private” options there. When you select Coming Soon, your website will display a default page generated by WordPress, as follows:
If you changed the option to Public, your site will be open as usual. If you change it to Private, your site will be blocked but visible to you and some logged-in users.
As you can see, unpublishing your WordPress site is easy when you work on WordPress.com.
How to unpublish WordPress site using a plugin?
It is possible to close your website by preventing search engines from indexing it. Just turn on the search engine visibility option in your WordPress reading settings. Your site no longer appears in search results.
You can use Plugin to Password Protect WordPress Content
Powerful and Affordable. However, this method is not suggested by many WordPress users and masters because of its limitations. Your content will continue indexed when linked to other websites. In addition, this feature only makes it difficult for Google to analyze and protect your private content.
To effectively hide or display content, you must use other methods, such as general website password protection or the meta tag “noindex”. You can protect each page and post to your website at the same time with a few clicks.
- Go to the WordPress password protection icon in your navigation menu
- Go to the Entire Site tab Enable Password protection
- Entire site option
- Enter your password Save your changes
Not only is the website locked with a password, but the plugin also prevents search engines from disabling them from the index by default. Visitors can’t find or access your website in search engines, even if they have the direct URL.
There are many plugins with this type of functionality, but let’s look at the popular SeedProd page, under construction and maintenance.
WordPress has also made it convenient for users to unpublish some posts and pages from the visitor’s point of view. Just sign in to your WP dashboard and open the post or page. In the upper right corner of the block editor, you’ll see the “Go to draft” option.
Click on it and a pop-up window will confirm if you want to unpublish it. Confirm by clicking the OK button to reset the page to design mode.
See also:
How To Change WordPress Theme? (Full Guide)
How To Unpublish WordPress Site
How To Unpublish WordPress Site (Complete Guide)
Final Result
Shutting down a WordPress site wouldn’t be a complicated task if you find the right method. Do you want to close some pages or posts? On the post-processing screen, put them in design mode. You can also make it private so that only administrators can view the content live.
Do you intend to unpublish the entire website? Assign a password and no one will be able to open or access it without your permission. The WordPress Password Protect plugin would be a perfect solution to prevent users from searching or viewing your content. It also helps prevent search engines from indexing your website.
Log in to your web host account first; from there, select the site you want to undo. Then go to Manage > Settings and scroll down to Privacy. Here you can see a similar screen:
