There may be different reasons why you need to know how to unpublish WordPress site. If you are not convinced with your blog, you can unpublish and start working on it before you re-publish again. Sometimes you may want to close your blog.
Why Unpublish WordPress site?
While it may be useful when you learn how to unpublish WordPress site. But you also need to know, when can you face these conditions.
The simple answer to Why? is:
Because you may need it as well sooner or later. If you won’t, someone you know may face this problem. Furthermore, there is no harm in acquiring knowledge. If you know the solutions when you face a possible hurdle, then you will be more productive as a site owner.
Check out the reasons to unpublish site in the points below:
When the site gets hacked
This is the worst possible situation that you may face. But you have to be ready for it. You need to shut down the site to prevent further threats and to avoid customer dissatisfaction.
When maintenance is needed on your site
If you are down for regular maintenance that may be quick. However, if the site development takes some time, it’s better to unpublish the site with a coming soon page or a maintenance mode. The incompleted site does not look good at all.
When you are out of time and want to inactive your services
If you are busy, you may prefer to unpublish the site for some period of time rather than deleting the site.
How to unpublish WordPress site effectively
Let’s discuss the methods that help to unpublish your site.
Add a Coming Soon Page
It’s obvious that you may not want the site to be online if it is still in developing mode. This can be done by keeping the site in maintenance mode with a coming soon page. The best coming soon pages are the ones that collect email from your users that helps to build your email marketing campaign.
There are different plugins that are available for free for this purpose. Depending on the launch date, you can add a countdown timer on the coming soon page. If people will signup, you can send email notifications to them when the site is launched. The coming soon page can be designed as per the need.
Unpublish WordPress Posts and Pages
Sometimes you may just want to unpublish a specific post or page. Instead of deleting, you can change the post visibility to private. When you change the visibility of the post to private, then only admin and editors will be able to see the post. However, you can also set a password for the content so that anyone opening the content requires a password to be able to open it.
Noindex
Google indexes the posts and pages so that everyone can find them publicly. If there are certain pages that you don’t like everyone to find. You can noindex them. Usually, confirmation pages, demo pages are preferred not to be indexed.
You can noindex a page or a post with the help of the plugin or with the help of noindex attribute across the source code of pages.
Hide Posts
You can hide a specific post or all the posts on your website. There is a plugin called WordPress Hide Posts that you can use for this purpose. You can choose to hide posts in a specific location or everywhere on the site with the help of a plugin. To hide the posts everywhere, choose to hide the posts from all the locations shown by the plugin. However, if someone has access to URL then they can view the post. If you have previously noindexed it, then it won’t be available in Google search.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you got an answer to how to unpublish WordPress site. There are circumstances when you need to unpublish the site rather than deleting the site. It will be useful to you in those cases.
Further Reading