WordPress is a powerful platform that provides endless customization options to its users. But, you might have a situation when you don’t want to show your specific pages to all.
For example, you don’t want to show the “Thank you” page to a user who is not a client/customer even search engines. Also, you won’t want anyone to see the landing page before they submit their email through the newsletter.
Whatever your reason might be, there is no universal rule to hide the pages. Let’s see how to hide a page on your WordPress with different methods.
Why Do You Want to Hide a Page On WordPress?
Before you take any steps to hide a page on WordPress, determine why you want to do that. There are two reasons to hide a page,
- Hide from search engine
- Hide from users.
If you have low-quality content that doesn’t add any value to users, it shouldn’t be indexed in the search engines. Also, you won’t want your login page to appear on search results for security issues. So you will have to set pages as secret and noindex.
On the other hand, if you have content that may be a landing page or premium resource, that shouldn’t be accessible to all. I think these are the top reasons to hide a page from users’ and search engines’ eyes.
5 Methods to Hide A Post/Page on WordPress
Below I have only discussed top and easy methods to hide pages from your WordPress site for users even search engines.
1. Hide a Page With Default WordPress Settings
Make sure your website never gets too mass by maintaining privacy from the start. Just after installing WordPress on your domain, you can make it invisible to search engines.
To do that click on Settings > Reading on WordPress Dashboard.
On scrolling down you will see a box “ Discourage search engines from indexing this site” tick this and click “Save Changes.” This method hides your website from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
You can read our other guide to make your site or post completely private.
2. Hide a Page With Robots.txt File(For Search Engines)
Sometimes you might want to hide some pages only from Search Engine. But your visitors can only see those pages after taking action on your website.
In this case, you can use the robots.txt file to hide such pages from the crawler.
If your site doesn’t have one already, create a robots.txt file and upload it to the root folder of your hosting. You need to add this bit of code to the file before uploading.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /page-URL/Replace the “page-URL” with the page/post slug you want to hide.
Note: Most WordPress SEO plugins have this feature, so you don’t have to add manually it to your site’s root folder.
Hide WordPress Post/Page With Plugins
If you’re looking for a solution to keep the page but hide it from a blog or a category, you have to use a plugin. Plugin makes doing specific tasks much easier than doing it manually. Although this comes with a drawback, the site becomes heavier as you install more plugins.
3. Hide with Unlist Post Plugin
You can hide a page or post in WordPress with different plugins. You can use Unlist Posts & Pages to hide a post very easily.
First, install and activate this free plugin from the WordPress repository. Open the page or post you want to hide in the WordPress editor.
You will see the “Unlist Post” option on the right side of the post/page editor panel. Tick the “unlist this post” button and update the post.
Now your page won’t appear on the new/recent blogs section or the category section. Neither anyone can find it on the site using the inbuilt search feature.
If you want to de-index it from Google, it’ll be almost hidden. Or use the robots.txt file to hide it from all search engines.
Remember, the page will not be deleted, but it’s not reachable from anywhere on your website unless you have a direct link. If a user has the exact link to the page/post, they can access it.
4. Hide with SEO Plugins (For Search Engine Only)
If you don’t want to hide a page or post with your robots.txt file, you can do that much more efficiently with an SEO plugin.
I have talked about almost all SEO plugins such as Yoast, RankMath, or AIOSEO have inbuild features to set any page to no-index. Also, you can just use the robots.txt files from these SEO tools.
5. Hide With Maintenance Plugin
If you have an unfinished or underdeveloped page or especially a broken page that might hurt your ranking and user experience, choosing a maintenance plugin is the best way. You can hide a specific page or your whole website with a maintenance plugin.
Some of the recommended plugins :
Some plugins put the whole website under maintenance mode, and some have specification features. So you have to choose how you want to hide your page.
If you have a one-page website, using any free or premium plugin is enough.
However, to hide a specific page while keeping your site live for visitors will need advanced settings. For that, you’ll need to set up your landing page in a folder under your main domain and then use a Maintenance plugin.
Conclusion
I hope this simple guide provided you with good insights into hiding pages on WordPress. It’s important to carefully consider your reasons for hiding a page and choose the most appropriate method.
Remember that your ultimate goal is to create the best possible user experience for your website visitors.
