Settings » Privacy Settings

Your site’s Privacy settings control who can view your site, allowing you to make the site public, private, or “Coming Soon”.

Visit Settings

Table of Contents

1. Privacy Options
2. Coming Soon
3. Launch your Site
4. View a Private Site
5. Change a Site with Followers from Public To Private

Privacy Options

To access your Site Privacy options:

1. Go to Settings → General
2. Scroll down to the Privacy section*

* Do not confuse this with Settings → Privacy on a plugin-enabled site, which is used for creating a privacy policy.

The Privacy settings look like this:

The three options are:

Coming Soon. A new site is set to Coming Soon until you launch it. Visitors will see a coming soon landing page, whereas you and visitors you have approved will see the full site.

Public. This is the setting used by most sites. It allows everyone to see your site and enables your site to be included in search engine results and other content sites.

Discourage search engines from indexing this site. If you want all human visitors to be able to see your site but don’t want your site to appear in search engines, this option will block most web crawlers for search engines. Please note, however, that not all search engines respect this setting.

Private. Select this option to make your site private. If you want specific people to be able to view it (and add comments if you’ve enabled them), you’ll need to invite them.

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Want your blog to be visible only to you and a select group of people? Read how to create a private blog on WordPress.com.

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Coming Soon

To give you time to create your site before you officially launch it, new sites are set as Coming Soon by default. New visitors will see a landing page letting people know that a site is being built. You don’t need to worry about your unfinished site being viewed before you’re ready.

If someone visits your site address before you’ve launched your site, this is what they will see.

If you have a plugin-enabled site, you can install an Under Construction or Maintenance plugin to design your own custom ‘Coming Soon’ page.

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Launch your Site

Launching your site means you are ready to share it with the world. To launch your site, go to Settings → General and click the Launch site button:

You can still edit your site after you launch it. You can also make your site private after launching it if you do not want the site to be public.

Before launching your site, you must verify the email address you used to sign up for your account. If you did not receive the verification email in your inbox, make sure to check your spam and junk mail folders. You can also resend the verification email or change the email address on the account by going to My Site → Settings and scrolling down on the General settings:

Once you have verified your email address, you can launch your site.

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View a Private Site

After marking your site as private, visitors will see a “Private Site” page if they’re not logged into the WordPress.com account they created when you invited them.

If you’d like to add people to a private site, please follow the invitation instructions on this page. All users added to a private site must have a WordPress.com account. Logging into a WordPress.com account ensures that only those people you’ve authorized can view your site.

This is what someone sees when they attempt to visit a site marked Private

A visitor can request access to a private site by clicking on the “request access” link when attempting to visit a private site while logged into their WordPress.com account. The site owner will receive a notification that the visitor wants to view the site, and it will be up to the site owner to approve or decline the request.

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Change a Site with Followers from Public To Private

If your site is public, but you’d like to make it private, you can change the settings to private at any time by following these instructions. To follow a private site, someone must first be invited.

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