How To Unpublish Your Showit Website

Some would say making changes to a Showit website is easy peasy lemon squeezy – I love that saying, don’t you? But what about when you need to hide your website from the rest of the world? While this may seem complicated, it’s actually very easy to unpublish your entire Showit website.

Whether you’ve accidentally published your website before it’s ready (oops!) or if you want to hide your site while you make some updates, there’s an easy way to prevent anyone from seeing your website.

Step 1: Create a Coming Soon Page

If you’ve accidentally published your website and you want to direct people to a coming soon page, there’s a really easy way to change the page people see when first coming to your website. Create a new page called ‘Coming Soon’ and after you’ve designed the page, click the three dots option and select Set as Homepage.

See the screenshot below for an example. This will then turn your Coming Soon page into the first page people see when landing on your website.

Examples of Showit Coming Soon Page Designs

If you’re looking for some inspiration for your Coming Soon page, here are some examples below from our Showit Website template collection. This is your opportunity to drum up excitement for your new website! Write a short paragraph explaining what your website will be about and give people an opportunity to sign up for your email list to be notified about your launch.

Step 2: Turn Off All Template Pages

If you want to make sure no one can see the rest of your website pages, you can manually turn off each page. To do this you’ll need to click the three dots next to each page and select the toggle for Publish (see screenshot below), if its blue that means the page is viewable, if you click the toggle and it turns gray, the page will be set to be hidden. Now, you MUST publish you site in order for these changes to take effect.

You may be wondering, what will people see if they happen to link to your unpublished page. If someone tries to access an unpublished page on your Showit website, they’ll see a Page Not Found page – which you can customize in Showit.

Examples of 404 (Page Not Found) Pages in Showit

Remember that your 404 page can be fun and engaging! Remember to always give people an opportunity to go back to your homepage, blog or provide your email address so they can reach out to you with any questions.

Have a Question About Showit?

Your Showit all know it all girl is here to help! I’ve been a Showit Design Partner since 2020 and I’m ready to answer any questions you have about my favorite website builder, Showit.

What do you think of this article? Do you have any questions for me? Ask me in the comments box below!