Make your site private, restrict access with a password, or share it with everyone using the Site Availability setting.

Use Site Availability to control who sees your site. You can make your site private to hide it from all visitors and search engines, add a password to make it accessible to some visitors, or make it public when the site is ready for everyone.

This guide reviews the different site availability options and how they appear to your visitors.

Before you begin

• To hide or publish individual pages, visit Controlling who can access your site's pages.
• Before publishing your site, use our site launch checklist to ensure your site is ready.
• For tips on making your site more visible to search engines, review our SEO tips.

Watch a video

Open Site Availability Settings

To change your site’s availability:

1. Open the Site Availability panel.
2. Select Public, Password Protected, Private, or SSO Protected (Enterprise plans only).
3. Click Save.

Tip: You can only select the Public option after the site is on a paid subscription.

Site availability options

Public

When your site is public, all visitors can access your site from any connected domain and the site is accessible to search engines. Use this setting when you’ve upgraded to a paid site and you’re ready to publish your site.

After your site is live:

• Search engines can index your site, but you can also request a reindex from Google or Bing right after publishing. You can increase your site’s visibility by using Squarespace’s built-in SEO tools.
• If you set up an online store and you’ve connected a payment processor, customers can now place orders.
• Learn how to share your site on social media.

Password protected

When your site is password-protected, visitors see a prompt to enter the password. You can use this setting on trial or paid sites.

To learn more, visit Using a site-wide password and Accessing and sharing a trial site.

Private

When your site is private, only site owners and contributors with login permissions can see it. Other visitors see the owner login page. It can be helpful to set your site to Private if you’re still building your site, or if you need to temporarily hide your site while you change the content.

Note: If your site was previously public, making it private prevents search engines from indexing it further. This means that search engines may have already indexed your site while it was public, and your content could appear in search results.

• Available for trial and paid sites. All trial sites are set to Private by default.
• You can set your availability back to Private at any time.
• To keep your site hidden from search engines, but accessible to certain visitors, set up a site-wide password instead of setting to Private.
• To exclude your site from scans by search engines or AI crawlers, but accessible to all visitors, visit Hiding your site from search results or Excluding your site from AI scans. 
• To only hide certain pages, visit Controlling who can access your site's pages.

While your site is private, visitors see a “Private Site” message when they visit your domain:

When you’re logged into a private site, you’ll see a banner at the bottom of the screen confirming that your site isn't public. Click Publish Your Site to open a window with a quick publishing button.

SSO protected

If you manage a company site on the Enterprise plan, you can limit access to your site via SSO (single sign-on). When this option is turned on, employees access the site via an authentication application like Okta, Azure, ClassLink, or Google.

To learn more, visit Setting up single sign-on protected sites and pages.

Unpublish your site

If you don’t need your site, or if you want to hide it for awhile, you have a few different options:

• Set your site to Private to hide it from all visitors and search engines.
• Set your site to Password Protected to grant select visitors access with a password.
• To only hide certain pages, visit Controlling who can access your site's pages.
• If you want to hide your site while you’re designing it, set up an Under Construction page.
• If your site is paid you can cancel your subscription.
• If your site is on a trial, cancel or delete it.

Site promotion

We sometimes promote our customers’ websites on our Templates page, or on our social media accounts like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. This can potentially increase traffic to your website.

In the Website panel of your site's settings, you can check or uncheck Allow Squarespace Promotion depending on whether you'd like us to consider your site.