How to Unpublish a WordPress Site

Unpublishing a WordPress site allows you to temporarily take down your site content without deleting it. This can be useful if you need to perform maintenance, redesign your site, or want to launch it at a later date.

In this comprehensive guide, I‘ll explain the various ways to unpublish your WordPress site, including:

• Using a plugin to put your site in maintenance mode
• Preventing search engines from indexing your unpublished content
• Unpublishing individual posts and pages
• Unpublishing posts and pages in bulk
• Additional tips for unpublished sites

By the end, you‘ll have all the information you need to successfully unpublish any WordPress site.

Using a Plugin to Unpublish Your Entire Site

The easiest way to unpublish an entire WordPress site is by using a plugin. The Maintenance plugin is a popular choice that puts your site into maintenance mode.

Here is how to set it up:

1. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New.
2. Search for "Maintenance" and click Install Now.
3. Once installed, click Activate.

This will enable the Maintenance plugin. You‘ll now see a Maintenance menu item in your dashboard.

4. Click Maintenance to access the settings.
5. Toggle the button at the top to enable maintenance mode. When active, your site will display the maintenance page to all visitors.

In the settings you can customize:

• The title, headline, and description visitors will see.
• Optional background images and colors.
• Whether you want to discourage search engine indexing.
• If you want to allow access for administrators.

For example, here are some sample maintenance mode settings:

Once configured, be sure to click Save Changes at the bottom.

That‘s all there is to it! Your WordPress site is now effectively unpublished and replaced with a static maintenance page.

To take your site out of maintenance mode, simply toggle the button at the top of the Maintenance plugin settings.

Alternative Plugins

The Maintenance plugin is not the only choice. Here are some other popular alternatives:

• Under Construction
• Coming Soon
• Seeds Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode

The options are very similar among these plugins. Pick the one that offers the customization options you need.

Prevent Search Engine Indexing

When unpublished, you probably don‘t want your WordPress site to still be indexed by search engines. This can lead to confusing search results for visitors.

Fortunately, preventing search engine indexing is easy:

1. Go to Settings > Reading in your dashboard.
2. Check the box for Discourage search engines from indexing this site.
3. Click Save Changes.

This will add a special meta name="robots" tag telling search engine crawlers not to index any pages.

For extra protection, you can also install the Yoast SEO plugin. It has a setting to set the entire site to "noindex", which serves the same purpose.

Unpublishing Individual Posts and Pages

If you only want to unpublish certain posts and pages, that can be done directly from the editor.

For example, to unpublish a post:

1. Go to Posts > All Posts.
2. Hover over the post you want to modify and click Edit.
3. In the right-side panel, click on Status & Visibility.
4. Next to Visibility, click on Public.
5. Choose Private to unpublish this post.

The process is the same for unpublishing a page, except you would go to Pages > All Pages first.

This will make the post or page private so that only administrators can view it in the dashboard. Regular visitors will receive a 404 error if they try to access the unpublished content.

Unpublishing in Bulk

If you want to unpublish multiple posts/pages at the same time, WordPress allows you to do this in bulk:

1. Go to Posts > All Posts or Pages > All Pages.
2. Check the boxes next to the content you want to modify.
3. In the Bulk Actions dropdown, select Edit.
4. Click Apply.
5. In the next screen, under Status select Private.
6. Click Update to unpublish all selected content.

This will change all the posts or pages you checked to private, unpublished status.

Using the bulk editor makes it easy to quickly hide a lot of content on your site.

Tips for Unpublished WordPress Sites

Whenever you unpublish a WordPress site, here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Install security plugins like Wordfence to protect unpublished content from being accessed by unauthorized visitors.
• Avoid unpublishing for more than a few weeks. Search engines will eventually drop unpublished sites from their indexes.
• Add a link to your maintenance page allowing administrators to access the unpublished site with a secret URL.
• Offsite backups are especially important with an unpublished site in case something happens to the unpublished content.
• Consider password protecting your maintenance page to prevent unauthorized access. Many of the plugins above include this option.
• For long outages, disable comments and close registrations to prevent spam buildup.
• Upload a robots.txt file to your web server to further discourage search engine indexing.

Conclusion

As you can see, unpublishing a WordPress site is straightforward:

• Plugins like Maintenance make it easy to put your entire site behind a maintenance page.
• Individual posts and pages can be unpublished through the editor.
• For bulk unpublishing, the edit function allows hiding many posts/pages at once.
• Take security precautions and avoid keeping a site unpublished indefinitely.

Now you know exactly how to temporarily unpublish any WordPress site until you are ready to make it live again! Let me know in the comments if you have any other questions.