How to Hide Your WordPress Site Until Ready 

Do you want to hide a WordPress site until it’s ready?

You can hide your WordPress website behind a maintenance mode or coming soon page with SeedProd. Doing so allows you to hide your unfinished small business website until it’s ready for the public to see.

This article will explain how to hide your WordPress site until it’s ready, allowing you to work on your website while it’s under construction.

You can check out this guide to learn the difference between landing pages vs splash pages.

One common theme is maintenance mode allows you to temporarily disable WordPress and choose when visitors can view your website. This means they won’t see broken graphics, messy HTML, or plugin errors, which can turn them away.

Instead, you can put up an under-construction page to let people know you’ll be up and running again soon.

So how do you go about hiding your WordPress site front-end? We’ll cover that next.

How to Hide Your WordPress Site While Working on It

Want to learn how to hide a page in WordPress or hide your entire website while working on it? Below we’ll show you how to make your WordPress site private until launch. So if you’re wondering, “how do I hide my WordPress site while developing?” you’re in the right place.

The easiest way to temporarily disable your WordPress site is to put it into maintenance mode with a WordPress plugin. For this, we suggest using SeedProd.

SeedProd is the best WordPress landing page and theme builder plugin for WordPress. With the easy drag-and-drop visual builder, it helps you build custom WordPress themes and high-converting landing pages in minutes.

With SeedProd’s landing page templates, you can easily make:

• Stunning thank you pages
• Lead-generating squeeze pages
• Revenue-boosting eCommerce sales pages
• Webinar registration pages
• WordPress coming soon pages
• Engaging video landing pages
• Custom WordPress login pages

With its fully responsive WordPress starter theme templates, you can quickly create a custom WordPress theme without code.

You can also limit access to your website while it’s under construction and hide single pages in WordPress by activating Coming Soon or Maintenance Mode. Plus, user roles allow you to disable the maintenance screen for logged-in users.

With this in mind, let’s look at how to hide your WordPress site during development with SeedProd.

Video Tutorial

Step 1. Set Up Your New WordPress Website

When you start a WordPress website for the first time, you’ll need to buy web hosting. For that, we recommend taking a look at Bluehost.

Bluehost offers affordable WordPress hosting and a free domain name, all in a single plan. It’s an officially recognized WordPress hosting provider, powering over 2 million WordPress websites.

Bluehost is an excellent option if you’re a new WordPress user because it automatically sets up WordPress for you. They also let you create a free business email address for the same domain name.

Siteground is another great alternative for hosting your website. If you need more help getting started, read this guide on how to start a WordPress blog.

Next, you’ll need to install a WordPress maintenance mode plugin to hide your site until it’s ready.

Step 2. Install SeedProd WP Maintenance Mode Plugin

The first step in learning how to make your WordPress site private until launch is 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.

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

Next up is installing and activating SeedProd on your WordPress website. If you’re not familiar with how to do this, you can check out this step-by-step tutorial to install 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.

Simply enter your key and click Verify Key.

Step 3. Enable Maintenance Mode in WordPress

To put your site into maintenance mode and temporarily turn off your WordPress site, click the SeeProd icon from your WordPress dashboard. This will take you to the SeedProd settings page.

Here you can create a maintenance mode page and make it active on your website (which we’ll show you how to do later).

But first, to enable maintenance mode, turn the toggle from the Inactive position to Active.

Congrats! You’ve hidden your WordPress site and learned how to hide your page in WordPress. Now let’s make your coming soon or maintenance page look a little more attractive to visitors.

Step 4. Design Your WordPress Maintenance Mode Custom Page

SeedProd makes it super-easy to design and customize maintenance pages in WordPress. This is important because it allows site visitors to still interact with your site, even if it’s hidden.

You can completely customize the entire look of your page in the visual builder and also add the following landing page elements with SeedProds’ drag-and-drop content blocks:

• Email Signup Form – Boost subscribers to your email list and get updates for when you’re live again.
• Contact Form – Let people get in touch and ask questions through a modern WordPress contact form.
• Social Profiles – Direct visitors to your social profiles for updates and engagement while your site is hidden.
• WooCommerce Blocks – Embed add-to-cart buttons, product grids, and more to your page.
• Social Share Buttons – Encourage users to raise awareness about your new design or features on social media.
• Countdown Timer – Give people a visual idea of when they can access your main site again.
• Plus, a whole lot more.

To begin designing your landing page, click the Set up a Maintenance Mode Page button.

SeedProd then asks you to choose a theme for your page.

With a growing library of landing page themes and templates to choose from, there’s bound to be something that suits your needs. If there isn’t, you can always select the blank template to start from scratch.

You’ll be taken to the drag-and-drop page builder as soon as you’ve picked a theme.

Here you can add new page elements, customize all your pages’ design elements, and add a personal message for visitors. You can also upload a custom background image to match your branding.

For a full step-by-step guide to putting your WordPress site in Maintenance mode using SeedProd, check this out.

Step 5. Publish Your WordPress Maintenance Page

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

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

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

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

From the visual page editor, click the Page Settings tab at the top of your screen. Then click the Access Controls option in the left-hand panel.

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

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.

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

With everything set up, let’s take a look at how to disable maintenance mode in WordPress.

How Do You Turn Off WordPress Maintenance Mode?

If you’ve followed the steps above for using SeedProd to set up maintenance, the time will come when you want to disable it.

To turn off WordPress maintenance mode, head to the SeedProd settings page by clicking the SeedProd icon in your WordPress admin area.

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

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.

How to Enable WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin

To enable maintenance mode in WordPress without a plugin, you’ll need to edit your theme’s functions.php file.

We’ve put together a code snippet you can use to make things a little easier. If you’re not familiar with how to do this, it’s best to ask your site developer to do this for you.

Simply edit your theme’s functions.php file and paste in the following code:

function maintenance_mode() {
 
      if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_themes' ) || !is_user_logged_in() ) {wp_die('Maintenance.');}
 
}
add_action('get_header', 'maintenance_mode');

To disable the maintenance mode and let users see your website, comment out the last line like this:

// add_action();

Since you’re familiar with hiding your WordPress site until it’s ready, how do you hide it from Google too? We’ll cover that next.

How to Hide Your WordPress Site from Google

Hiding your website from Google is mainly done when you don’t want your site indexed in search engines. This stops your web pages from appearing in search results.

You can hide your site from Google using a plugin from WordPress.org or by editing one of your site files. Let’s take a look at each method.

Method 1: How to Hide Your Site From Google With a Plugin

To hide your site from Google with a plugin, start downloading and installing the All In One SEO plugin. Once you’ve activated it, head to any post or page and click Edit.

Then scroll to below the editor, where you’ll see the All in One SEO settings. To hide posts and pages from Google, scroll down to the section labeled “NOINDEX this page/post.”

Then click the checkbox to stop search engines from showing your post or page in search results.

Publish your changes, and SeedProd will hide your content for that specific post or page from Google.

Method 2: How to Hide Your Site From Search Engines Using robots.txt File

Alternatively, you can hide your website from search engines by editing your site’s robots.txt file. This might be a little tricky for beginners, so only use this method if you’re sure you know what you’re doing.

You can edit your robots.txt file by connecting to your site using an FTP client or the ‘File Manager’ in your WordPress hosting provider.

Then you’ll have to add these lines of code to your robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /your-page/

Make sure you replace ‘your page’ with the URL you’d like to hide and save your changes.

And there you have it! You now know how to hide your WordPress site until it’s ready for public viewing.

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

So what are you waiting for?

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

• How to Make a Sales Page With WordPress (Step-by-Step)
• 6+ Best Photo Gallery WordPress Plugins (Expert Pick)
• How to Customize WordPress Post Excerpts (Without Code)

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