Closing your site temporarily

Useful while you rebuild, while you rewrite your prices, or for the week between deciding to rebrand and being ready to show anyone. Visitors see a short holding page instead of your website; you keep working as normal.

Close the site

1. In your panel, go to Website → Site settings.
2. Open the Maintenance tab. The top of it says Your site is open or

Your site is closed.

1. Optionally, write the holding page's heading under What it says and a

line or two under And underneath, then press Save all of it. If you leave them empty, the page says Back shortly and that the site will be back very soon.

1. Press Close the site.

Visitors now see the holding page.

What stays open while it is closed

**Your galleries, booking page, invoices and contracts are not affected at all.** Only the public website is closed, so a client waiting on a wedding gallery never sees the holding page.

Your panel keeps working too, and so do the behind-the-scenes things that keep your site healthy: the list of pages Google reads, your site's little browser icon, and the secure padlock (https), which carries on renewing so you do not come back to a browser warning.

The holding page also tells Google the closure is temporary, so your place in search results is kept rather than your site being treated as gone.

Showing somebody the real site

While the site is closed, the Maintenance tab shows Preview your site. That link carries a private key: copy it and send it to a client, a designer, your partner — anybody who needs to see the work in progress.

• It is remembered. Once they have followed the link, they can click around the whole site normally.
• It cannot be guessed. The key is random, not made from your domain or your studio's name.

You do not need the link yourself. While you are signed in to your panel, you see the real site, with a dark bar at the bottom of the window. The bar says Maintenance mode is on, so you never forget the site is closed, and its Turn it off button takes you straight to the Maintenance tab. Anyone who came in on the preview link sees a smaller note saying the site is a preview. Neither is ever shown to ordinary visitors.

The same goes if your site is ever paused from our side for maintenance: you still see it while you are signed in, with a bar saying it is offline to visitors.

Signing out of the panel ends this on that browser. Signing in again brings it back.

Opening up again

Go back to the Maintenance tab and press Open the site.

That also retires the preview link, so a link you handed out during one closure will not work during the next. Close the site again and you get a fresh link to hand out.

Closing is not the same as leaving

Closing is temporary and keeps your address, your padlock and your place in search results.

If you are moving to a new domain, see your domain. If you are leaving, see getting your data out.