How to Make Your WordPress Website Private Until You’re Ready to Launch

You’ve been dreaming of this day for as long as you can remember — the day you finally launch your WordPress website. And finally, you’re ready to make that wish come true!

It’s an exciting day, but it’s also a little daunting. After all, once you make the move and put your website live, you’ll never be able to unbox it again. So you want to make sure you do it right.

What happens if you forget to do one tiny thing? Well, you could end up costing yourself thousands of dollars and months of precious time. So it’s essential that you take the time to do this right. And what’s more is that even if you do everything perfectly, you might never see the full benefits of your hard work. That’s why it’s imperative that you keep your site private for as long as possible.

Why Is My WordPress Website Public By Default?

WordPress saves the credentials of the person who last edited a post or activated a theme on your site in a file called “hacks.” This way, anyone who visits your site can see your login information. So if you change your mind and decide to make your site private, you’ll have to take steps to remove this information.

Sometimes it can be difficult to find the right time to make a blog post on your site. So instead of waiting until you have something to say, you might end up publishing a few boring essays just to have something to show to your visitors. This is why it’s preferable to keep your site private until you’re ready to launch — so you can control when content is published and what’s allowed inside your site.

Why Should I Host My WordPress Website With a VPS?

You don’t need a VPS to host a WordPress site. In fact, you can use your own personal computer and simple shared hosting to do so. But the advantages of a VPS are numerous. With a VPS, you’re essentially renting a slice of server space from a company like Amazon, which gives you the benefits of a dedicated IP address and tons of storage space. These are things you don’t get with shared hosting.

Additionally, with a VPS, you can install separate WordPress installations on multiple domains. So if you have a retail website and a cooking blog, you can use one VPS to host both. The main difference between the two is that the retail site’s visitors will see mostly product reviews and sales pitches. Whereas, the cooking blog will feature mostly food photographs and recipes.

There are also a few differences in the setup of a retail and a cooking blog on a VPS. For instance, the retail site will need a few more plug-ins to be activated, as well as the WooCommerce shopping cart software.

How Many Visitors Should I Expect At This Point?

Assuming you followed all the steps in the previous section and published a couple of engaging blog posts, the next step is to check your site’s traffic. Once you have it up and running, you can use Google Analytics to track its traffic. This way, you’ll know how many visitors you’re likely to receive and what content is performing the best. In most cases, your target audience will be people looking for furniture stores in your area. So if a post on your site gets 100,000 hits, this might indicate that your audience is bigger than you expected and that your blog post was a success.

However, if your post only gets 10,000 hits, this could mean that either your content isn’t that good or that your target audience isn’t that interested in your topic. In either case, you should consider working on expanding your audience and finding the right mix of content to attract as many people as possible.

Once I Make My WordPress Website Public, How Do I Keep It That Way?

If you decide that now is the right time to launch your blog, you have two options. You can either make it openly available to the world or you can take measures to keep it private until you’re ready to broadcast it to the internet. There’s pros and cons to both approaches, so you need to determine which one you want to follow. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll assume that you want to keep your site private until you’re ready to launch. So now that you have a few articles published on your blog, how do you keep it that way?

The first step is to make sure that your WordPress installation is secured. This means taking certain precautions to prevent unauthorized access to your site. You can use the free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to do so. What’s more is that with a Let’s Encrypt certificate, all you have to do is change a few settings in your WordPress website and you’re done. The second step is to set the “auto-draft” option to “no,”” so that you have to manually edit each piece of content before it gets published. This ensures that nobody is sneaking on your site without your knowledge and trying to put out content without your approval.

Now that your site is protected and you have a few posts published, it’s time to take the next step — making your site available to the public. So how do you do that? You can either use the free WordPress.com option or you can purchase a premium theme and install it on your own server.

If you choose the second option, you’ll need to decide on what domain name you want to use for your site. You also need to pick a password and keep it secret — just in case someone tries to guess your login information.

Once you have a fully functional WordPress site, the last step is to populate it with content. If you chose to use an affiliate marketing tool like Amazon Associates to promote your various products, you’ll need to get in touch with that program’s representative to get the necessary information to generate the necessary affiliate links.

An important thing to keep in mind is that if you’re starting from scratch and have never launched a blog before, the process can seem a little overwhelming. So even if you keep your site private, you might not see the full benefits of your hard work for a couple of months. Just remember to take it easy and have fun — the process will all be worth it in the end!