Hide a WordPress Site From Search Engines

While a site is under construction, or when it is a private or staging project, you may not want Google or Bing to list it. Vendi Today includes a single switch that tells search engines to stay away, with no SEO plugin required.

What the switch does

When Discourage SEO Indexing is turned on, Vendi Today:

• Adds instructions to the site's robots file asking crawlers not to visit or index pages.
• Adds a "noindex, nofollow" tag to the header of every page.
• Applies the change immediately, with no WordPress files to edit.

If you also use an SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math, this Vendi Today setting takes priority for indexing.

How to turn it on

1. Click Sites in the left menu and open the WordPress tab.
2. Click Manage Website on the site you want to change.
3. Open the Advanced Settings tab.
4. Click WordPress Management.
5. Switch Discourage SEO Indexing to ON.
6. Wait for the confirmation message that the setting was saved.

To make the site discoverable again at launch, return to the same screen and switch it OFF.

Limits to keep in mind

• The setting covers the whole site; you cannot exclude single pages with it.
• It only influences well-behaved search crawlers. Rogue bots may ignore it, and anyone with the link can still open the site.
• Only users with administrator-level access can see and change this setting.
• Visitors notice no difference in speed or access.

Pages that were already indexed may take time to drop out of search results after you enable the switch.

Good to know: Put a reminder on your launch checklist to switch this setting off, as forgetting it is a common reason a new site never shows up in search.