Controlling who can access your site's pages

Hide or limit access to specific pages or your whole site.

Last updated December 21, 2023

There are several ways to control who accesses your site and its content. This guide gives an overview of different options, and links to more information about each one.

Tip

If you’re on our Enterprise plan, you can set up single sign-on to view your site. This feature enables you to create internal sites for your organization that are secured behind an SSO login flow.

Your entire site

You can control access to your whole site in the Site Availability panel.

The table below compares our Site Availability options. This shows who your site is accessible to, based on the setting you choose. Contributors with viewer permissions can access your site, regardless of your Site Availability setting. To learn more, visit Publishing or hiding your site.

 

Visitors can access

Search engines can index

Contributors with Viewer permissions can access

Private

Public

Password

✓ with password

✓ no password required

SSO (single sign-on)

✓ employees with SSO credentials

You can also tell search engine and AI crawlers to exclude your site from their scans in the Settings panel.

Specific pages

There are several ways to hide pages from visitors, search engines, or both:

  • Member sites - Create sets of members-only pages on your site. Your visitors gain exclusive access to your gated content by creating an account and paying for membership, if you've set a price.
  • Disable pages - Hides them from visitors and search engines.
  • Add page passwords - Hides them from search engines, but visitors who have the password can access.
  • Enable the noindex tag - Hides the page from search engines, while leaving it public and available for visitors to access. You can add this in page settings or with code injection.
  • Move the page to Not linked - The page's link no longer appears in your navigation, but search engines and visitors can still access it.

Here's a comparison of each of these options:

 

Accessible to visitors

Accessible to search engines

Can appear in navigation

Noindex tag in code

Included in site map

Enabled page

Disabled page

Page password

✓ with password

Member Sites

✓ with account

Noindex from page settings

Noindex from code injection

Not linked

Tip

Google's Remove URLs Tool lets you temporarily block pages from Google Search results on sites that you own. For help with this, visit Google's documentation.

Hidden pages may still appear in search results

If a site or page was previously public, hiding it prevents search engines from indexing it further.  If a search engine has already indexed your content, and then you hide it using any of the options above, it may take a while to be removed from search results.

To speed up the process, you can ask Google to index your site.

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Controlling who can access your site's pages