How to Hide WordPress Site While Building (With or Without Plugins)

Building a website for yourself is always exciting. Whether you are building a website for blogging or for your business, you are very excited about what’s going to happen next. With that being said, you don’t want others to see your website until it is fully developed.

You want to set a notification that lets your visitor know that it is under construction and will be coming soon. —In the meantime, you want to keep your website hidden. Hiding your website is quite easy. There are several methods to do this.

This brings us to show you 2 methods for keeping your website concealed at the time of development. Without further ado, let’s break it down for you.

Best Ways to Hide WordPress Site While Building

The ways that we are going to discuss are all effective yet easy to apply. These effective methods are – Enabling maintenance mode while under development

• Blocking all IP addresses except yours
• Using a suitable plugin by enabling maintenance mode

1 By Enabling Maintenance Mode –

Instead of showing the public an incomplete website, you can go into maintenance mode to provide a handy notification that the site is still under construction. Enabling the maintenance mode shows your visitor a WordPress coming soon page until it is fully developed.
This method can benefit you in numerous ways –

• A countdown timer will be activated showing a coming-soon page. This will notify the visitors when your site is going live.
• Your visitors will know that the website is not available yet.
• Also, you can introduce and display your social media channels while your website remains underdeveloped.
• What’s more, you can insert a newsletter subscription for your audience so that they can get notified as soon as your website officially arrives.

— If you are not using a test site, you should definitely put your site into maintenance mode as you are making changes to the site in real-time. This allows you to troubleshoot user interface issues.

Enabling the maintenance mode allows you to display easy-to-use messages, alternative links to access, and indicate when maintenance will be over.

While there can be many plugins to activate the maintenance mode, we will be showing how you can do this with 2 simple plugins. They are –

• Enable maintenance mode using SeedProd
• Enable maintenance mode using WP Maintenance Mode

 Important One: A Best guide on WordPress Speed Optimization

How to enable maintenance mode using the SeedProd plugin:

SeedProd is a free WordPress plugin use in more than a million websites. It is one of the best WordPress landing page builders that allows you to enable maintenance mode, build custom 404 pages, coming soon pages, and more. Even, you can design a complete landing page with this.

If you want to have advanced customization features, premium templates, marketing integrations; then go for the premium version of SeedProd. The free version is more than enough to put your WordPress site in maintenance mode.

Now, follow the steps below to turn on maintenance mode on your WordPress site using the SeedProd plugin –

• First, you need to do is install and activate the SeedProd plugin.
• Once it is successfully activated, click on‘Set up a Maintenance Mode Page’ by going to –

SeedProd » Pages

• This will let you build a maintenance page after you have enabled maintenance mode.
• To do this, either select a premade template or build one from the scratch. Select a premade or blank template by hovering your mouse on the thumbnail and click the ‘Check’ mark.

• After selecting a suitable template, the SeedProd drag & drop page builder will open allowing you to customize the page. Also, you can drag a new element from the block section, which is at the left panel.

• The final step would be activating the maintenance mode. Go back to – SeedProd » Pages and toggle the ‘Active’ button on.

Done! Now the maintenance mode will show a particular page so that viewers can get an idea that your website is under development and it will be coming very soon. If you are not satisfied with our brief description, a more informative and broad discussion can be found on the official SpeedProd site.

 How to enable maintenance mode using the WP Maintenance Mode plugin

The WP Maintenance Mode plugin is another great option for this job. Although it doesn’t have a powerful web page builder functionality like the SpeedProd, you can quickly set up a maintenance mode.

WP maintenance mode allows you to have full access to your site in maintenance mode when you are the administrator. — As a result, you can log in to your WordPress dashboard as the website is up for you. You can also determine user roles for the web interface and server part in maintenance mode. However, it will be set to administrators only by default.

Now let’s break down the process of enabling maintenance mode through the WP Maintenance Mode plugin –

• Just like SpeedProd, install and activate the plugin.
• After the activation, you need to configure the settings by going to –

Settings » WP Maintenance Mode

• Once you are in the “WP Maintenance Mode”, you will see 5 tabs. By default, you will be in the General tab.
• The ‘Status’ option under the General tab will be set to ‘Deactivated’ by default. In order to put your site in maintenance mode, change it to ‘Activated’.
• It will be wise not to touch the other options, especially when your site is under construction. — For instance, if you want search engines to locate your website, then set the ‘Bypass for Search Bots’ option to Yes.

Good! The maintenance mode for your WordPress site will be enabled if you have successfully followed the above steps. And if this is not enough for you, you can create a splash page for the maintenance mode.

Beautiful landing pages can be created with the WP Maintenance Mode plugin. If you want to display these types of pages, you need to follow the below steps –

• To create a splash page, navigate to the Design tab inside the plugin’s settings.

• Then, you will need to provide a proper title, heading, and text that will be displayed on the maintenance page. If you are creating a coming soon page, insert proper content accordingly.
• For the background, you can either set a pre-defined image or upload your preferred one. You can also define a color for the text and background.
• Click the save changes button once you are happy with your settings.

We hope, you have enjoyed the procedure of hiding a WordPress site by enabling the maintenance mode. Take a look at the following video to get a real-time demonstration –

2 Blocking All IP Addresses Except Yours –

This is an innovative way to block users from entering your WordPress website while it is under development. To go with the process, you need to make all IP addresses blocked except for yours.

The .htaccess file is used by the web servers that run on Apache. This file is needed for configuration like controlling the live directory along with the subdirectories inside it.

Locate the .htaccess file inside the root folder of the website. Add the following lines on top of the file to enable IP restrictions  –

— Here, replace (aa.bb.cc.dd) with your IP address and save the file. The above code segment defines the webserver to block all IP addresses of users while the bottom line indicates your IP address that should have the authority to access the website.

 Overall Verdict:

It is not good for you and your visitors to comes to your website during development. Setting a maintenance mode showing a beautiful “Coming Soon” page will keep your professionalism and your visitors will know when your site is going live. The methods we have shown in this article are useful in a variety of situations. Choose the most effective one for your site.

Thanks for reading this article, leave a comment below if you have any questions regarding how to hide the WordPress site while building. We will gladly help you.