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”.

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Privacy Options

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 that 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 to be a viewer.

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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.

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Launch your Site

Launching your site means you are ready to make it accessible to the public. 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 again after launching it if needed.

Before you can launch your site, you will need to 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 scroll down on the General settings:

Once you have verified your email address, you will be able to 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 their WordPress.com account they created when you invited them as a Viewer.

If you’d like to add viewers to a private site, please follow the invitation instructions on this page. All viewers 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 are able to view your site.

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 added as a viewer.