Is my site live?

How to review and customize your site's visibility.

Last updated December 16, 2024

All Squarespace sites are private by default, meaning only site owners and contributors can see it. You have the option to add a site-wide password for visitor access, or you can make a paid site fully public.

This guide covers where and how visitors can view your site and how to keep it private until you're ready to go live.

Note

To troubleshoot site availability issues, visit Is my site down?

When a trial is live

All trial sites are private by default, and only live to site owners and contributors. Since trial sites are hidden from search engines, people typically won’t find them unless you share a direct link or connect it to a third-party domain that people already know.

You can make the site live to select visitors by adding a site-wide password. To learn more, visit Using a site-wide password.

When a paid site is live

Currently, what happens when you upgrade depends on when you created your trial, and your availability settings. If you haven't upgraded yet, visit Upgrading to paid service to learn more.

To check if your site is live, go to the Home menu, click Settings, and then click Site Availability. Your site is live if it's set to Public. To learn more, visit Publishing or hiding your site.

When an online store is live

To sell item or services through Squarespace, connect a payment processor. If you add products to your site without connecting a payment processor, visitors trying to check out will see a banner saying "Checkout is closed. This store isn't set up to process payments." After you connect a payment processor, this banner will disappear and customers can complete the checkout process.

To learn more, visit Getting started with Squarespace Commerce.

When changes are live

When editing your site, the following changes won't be publicly visible until you save your changes:

  • Edits made to layout pages.
  • Edits made to blog posts, events, and products.
  • Edits made to page descriptions or other settings fields.
  • Edits made to style and design settings.
  • Edits made to content block areas, such as footers.

These changes are publicly visible as soon as a visitor refreshes the page.

  • Images added to gallery sections.
  • Images or videos added to gallery pages.
  • Tracks added to album pages.
  • Adding, deleting, or rearranging pages in the navigation menu.

Note

When previewing a template in version 7.0, content edits on your own pages will be publicly visible. Demo pages won't be visible. To learn more, visit Switching templates.

Keep your site private

After upgrading to a paid site, you may still want to keep your site private or use a site-wide password until you’re ready for the world to see it.

Note

Setting up Google Workspace or verifying other services may require you to temporarily deactivate site-wide or page passwords.

Remove content from search engines

If search engines indexed your site before you were ready to go live, you can often remove this information using Google Search Console. Squarespace is unable to assist with this process. Visit Google's documentation for more information.

If search engines haven't indexed your site yet, you can use these steps to hide a page from search engine results.

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