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How to Hide Your WordPress Site Until Ready

How to Hide Your WordPress Site Until Ready: The Easiest Ways 

Written By: author image Stacey Corrin
author image Stacey Corrin
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.
     Reviewed By: John Turner
reviewer image John Turner
John Turner is the co-founder of SeedProd. He has over 20+ years of business and development experience and his plugins have been downloaded over 25 million times.

Many people ask us how to hide a WordPress site until it’s ready. They want to update their site’s design, but they don’t want visitors to see unfinished pages.

We usually recommend using maintenance mode or a coming soon page. This hides the site, so you can work on it privately.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to make your WordPress site private so you can work on it without interruptions.

How to Hide Your WordPress Site Until It’s Ready:

Why Hide Your WordPress Site Before It’s Ready?

There are many good reasons to keep your WordPress site hidden while you’re working on it:

  • Look Professional: A website that’s not finished can give people the wrong idea about your brand. It’s better to keep your site hidden until it looks great and works well.
  • Better User Experience: Unfinished parts of your website might confuse visitors. Hiding your site means people won’t see these problems.
  • Protect Your SEO: Search engines like Google want to show websites with good, relevant content. If your site is messy or unfinished, it can hurt your ranking. Keep it hidden to avoid this.
  • Increase Security: Hidden websites are less likely to be attacked by hackers. Keeping your site hidden helps keep it safe.
  • Test Without Worry: When you’re building a website, you’ll probably find some errors. A hidden site lets you fix these errors without bothering your visitors.
  • Improve Your Content: You’ll need to make changes to your website’s text, images, and design. Hiding the site gives you a safe space to do this.
  • Get Feedback from Clients: If you’re building a website for someone else, you can use a hidden site to get their feedback before it’s public.

Now that you know the reasons for hiding your website, let’s look at how to do it.

How to Hide Your WordPress Site Until It’s Ready

The easiest way to make your website private is by using “maintenance mode.” We recommend using the SeedProd plugin for this.

How to hide your WordPress site during development with SeedProd

SeedProd is the best WordPress landing page and theme builder plugin. Its simple drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to create these pages quickly.

SeedProd can also help you hide your website while you are still building it. You can choose between “Coming Soon” mode or “Maintenance Mode.” You can even set it so that people who are logged in to your site can still see everything.

Let’s look at how to hide your WordPress site with SeedProd.

Step 1. Set Up Your New WordPress Website

If you’re creating a new website, the first step is to get web hosting. We recommend Bluehost for this.

bluehost best WordPress hosting solution

Bluehost has affordable plans that include both web hosting and a free domain name. It’s officially recommended by WordPress and hosts over 2 million websites.

Bluehost is perfect for new WordPress users because it makes setting up your website easy. Plus, it gives you a free business email address with your domain name.

Siteground is another good option for hosting your website. Need more help with the first steps? Read our guide on creating a WordPress website.

Once you have your website set up, you’ll need to install a maintenance mode plugin.

Step 2. Install the SeedProd Plugin

Now, you’ll need to get a copy of SeedProd. Once you’ve created your account, head to the login page to access your account dashboard.

Click View License Key, Details, and Downloads as shown below.

Get your SeedProd license key from the SeedPod dashboard

Then, copy your license key and click Download Landing Page Pro to save the maintenance plugin to your computer.

Download the SeedProd landing page, Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode plugin

Next, install and activate the SeedProd plugin on your WordPress site. If you’re not familiar with how to do this, check out this step-by-step tutorial for installing WordPress plugins.

Upon activating the plugin, you’ll see a page asking you to enter your license key. If you recall, you copied this when downloading the plugin.

Enter your SeedProd license key

Simply enter your key and click Verify Key.

Step 3. Create Your Maintenance Mode Page

SeedProd makes it easy to design a custom page that people will see while your site is hidden. This helps you keep visitors interested, even though your website isn’t ready yet.

You have complete control over the design of your page and can use SeedProd’s drag-and-drop builder to add useful elements, like:

  • Email Signup Form: Get people to sign up for your email list so they’ll know when your site launches.
  • Contact Form: Give visitors a way to get in touch and ask questions.
  • Social Profiles: Show links to your profiles on social media so people can follow you for updates.
  • WooCommerce Blocks: If you’re selling products online, you can add buttons, product grids, and more.
  • Social Share Buttons: Let your visitors spread the word about your new site.
  • Countdown Timer: Create excitement by showing people exactly when your site will be live.
  • And Much More.

To start designing your page, click the “Set up a Maintenance Mode Page” button.

Set up a miantenance mode page to disable you WordPress site temporarily

Next, SeedProd will ask you to choose a theme for your page.

Don’t worry – there are lots of themes and templates to choose from, so you’ll find one that fits your website. If you want complete control over the design, you can even start with a blank template.

Choose a maintenance mode landing page template

Step 4. Customize Your Maintenance Mode Page

Once you’ve chosen a theme, you’ll see SeedProd’s drag-and-drop page builder.

Now, you can start customizing. Add new elements, change the design, write a message for your visitors, and even upload your own background image to match your brand.

Design your maintenance mode page in WordPress

Here’s a full step-by-step guide to putting your WordPress site in Maintenance mode using SeedProd.

Step 5. Choose When to Show Your Maintenance Page

Most maintenance mode plugins display only one maintenance page for the entire website. However, SeedProd is more advanced, allowing you to choose which pages to hide.

You may want to hide your entire site until it is ready initially or specific pages or posts in the future.

Understanding this feature will be helpful for future development. To manage where you display your maintenance page, go to the Page Settings in the SeedProd builder and click on Access Control.

SeedProd access controls

Next, scroll down to the Include/ Exclude URLs section. This is where you can tell SeedProd how to hide your site.

include exclude URLs in SeedProd

Here’s what the different access control settings mean:

  • Show on the Entire Website: This is the default setting and the best choice to hide your WordPress site until it’s ready. Anyone who tries to view any page on your site will see the maintenance mode page on the front end.
  • Show on the Home Page Only: You can use this to show your new page only on the homepage of your website. All other pages and posts will still be in public view.
  • Include URLs: Use this setting to choose specific pages for your maintenance page to show. For example, if you’re writing new content for one of your pages, you can hide just that 1 page and leave everything else on the site visible.
  • Exclude URLs: This setting does the opposite of Include URLs. It hides the entire site except for the pages you specify. Choose this to keep certain pages accessible while hiding the rest.

Allow Access to a Hidden WordPress Site

What if you need to give access to someone who can’t log in to your website? There’s a pretty simple solution.

In the Page Settings area, you can create a secret access link that lets people bypass the page hiding your WordPress site.

On the right-hand side of your screen, you can create a secret phrase added to a unique bypass URL.

Bypass the WordPress maintenance mode page with a custom URL and password

Then, you can send this URL to anyone you’d like to have access to your site without them seeing the construction page.

It’s also possible to add a password to your landing page. This will let you grant access to specific people, such as clients.

You can follow this guide to learn all about password protection in WordPress.

Below the Bypass URL section is the Bypass by IP area. This allows visitors from specific IP addresses to bypass your landing page automatically.

Bypass landing page by ip address

All you have to do is add each IP address on a new line in the field provided.

Step 6. Hide Your WordPress Website Until It’s Ready

When you’re happy, it’s time to publish your page. To do so, select the dropdown arrow next to the Save Changes button at the top-right corner and click Publish.

Save changes and publish your page to hide your WordPress site while working on it

SeedProd will then show a lightbox popup notifying you that your page is live.

Maintenance mode published notification

Then, you can click the See Live Page button to see what your maintenance page looks like.

Here’s an example from a page we created on our test website:

Hide your WordPress website with Maintenance mode splash page

Now let’s enable your maintenance page, which you can do by heading back to SeedProd » Landing Pages, then turning the Maintenance Mode toggle from the Inactive position to Active.

activate your maintenance mode page to hide your WordPress site until ready

Congrats! You’ve hidden your WordPress site.

How Do You Turn Off WordPress Maintenance Mode?

If you’ve followed the steps above to set up maintenance, you will eventually want to disable it.

To turn off WordPress maintenance mode, go to the SeedProd settings page by clicking the SeedProd icon in your WordPress dashboard.

Then, click the toggle under the Maintenance Mode section to turn it from Active to Inactive.

How to disable maintenance mode in wordpress

Now, your site is no longer hidden from website visitors.

What if you don’t want to use a plugin to set up a maintenance page? We have instructions for that next.

Bonus: Hide Your WordPress Site from Google

Sometimes, you might want to hide your site from search engines like Google. This means your pages won’t appear in search results.

Here are a few ways to hide your site from Google:

  • WordPress Settings: You can often do this directly within your WordPress website settings.
  • Use a Plugin: WordPress.org offers plugins that can help you manage how search engines see your site.
  • Edit Your Site Files: This option is for advanced users only, as it requires editing your website’s code.

Let’s take a closer look at the 2 easiest methods.

Hide Your Site in WordPress Settings

This method stops search engines from adding your website to their results. People won’t be able to find your site using Google, but they can still visit it if they have the direct link.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Go to your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Click on “Settings.”
  3. Select “Reading.”
  4. Check the box that says, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.”

This tells search engines that you don’t want your site to be public just yet.

Hide Your Site From Google With a Plugin

You can also use a WordPress SEO plugin to hide individual pages or posts from Google while keeping the rest of your site visible.

We’ll use a popular plugin called All In One SEO for this:

  1. Download and Install: Get the All In One SEO plugin from the WordPress plugin directory and install it on your site.
  2. Edit a Page or Post: Go to the page or post you want to hide and click “Edit.”
  3. Find the All In One SEO Settings: Scroll down below the main editor until you see the All in One SEO settings area.
  4. Check “NOINDEX”: Look for the section labeled “NOINDEX this page/post.” Check the box.
  5. Publish Your Changes: Save or update your page or post.
How to hide your WordPress site from google with a plugin

This tells search engines not to show the selected page or post in search results.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I password-protect my WordPress site?

To password protect your WordPress site, you can use a password protection plugin or add a password to individual pages. For more details, check out this ultimate guide on password-protecting WordPress.

How do I create a staging site in WordPress?

To create a staging site in WordPress, you can use a plugin like Duplicator. It allows you to create a duplicate of your site that you can work on without affecting the live site. After making changes to the staging site, you can push them to the live site when you’re ready.

Get Started with Hiding Your WordPress Site

You now know the simplest methods for making your WordPress site private until it’s ready for public viewing.

SeedProd’s drag-and-drop page builder makes it easy to hide your website in minutes, with no coding required. And the best thing? It’s one of the easiest ways to increase your conversion rates.

Ready to make your WordPress site private?

We hope you found this guide helpful. If you’re interested in more helpful WordPress tutorials, check these out:

Thanks for reading! We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please feel free to leave a comment with any questions and feedback.

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author avatar
Stacey Corrin Writer
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.

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