Wix has now become one of the growing platforms where you can publish your website fast. It also has a free plan which is the reason why it attracts so many new customers.
It happens a lot when you have invested your time in creating a perfect Wix website. Now, for some reason, you just drop the idea of publishing it. However, you can’t delete the website as you will need it shortly. So, the best way is to unpublish a Wix site.
We are here going to see how to unpublish the Wix site.
Unpublishing Wix site vs Deleting Wix site
The first thing we will do is learn the difference between the two terms. If you have been on the website creation side for a while, you will already be knowing all of these. However, if you are new to website creation, you might think both of them are the same.
However, it is not so. Unpublishing and deleting are two different things.
Deleting a website means you are completely deleting the website from the internet and the Wix servers. Once you delete your website, you will not get the data back. Chances are that you won’t even get your website’s URL back. In the future, if you want to upload that website again, you will have to choose a different domain name and do the entire work. If you don’t have a backup, it will be a lot of work and effort that you will have to put in.
On the other hand, unpublishing a Wix site is the perfect option if you want the site in the future. Unpublishing a website will not delete the website. Instead, what it will do is, it will just take it off for the public. Let me explain it to you in detail. The website will be visible to you if you open Wix’s account. You will see the entire website with data over there.
However, it will not be accessible to all other people. If you open the URL of a website, it will not load the website.
Why Unpublish Wix Site?
If the website won’t be accessible for site visitors, why one should unpublish a Wix site? It is not at all needed for most people to unpublish the website.
However, depending on your idea of the website, you might need to unpublish a website. Here are some of the reasons why you might want to unpublish a website.
- The most common reason to unpublish a website is because of the new update. If you are planning to give an entirely new experience to your users, you can unpublish your website for editing. In some cases, if you edit the website while it is live, people will see it. So, if you don’t want them to know about it, you can use the unpublish option to do it.
- If you are changing the way you do business or you are working on something new, you can surely unpublish the website for a while.
- You want to take a break from the website and go offline for a while. You can always display a message saying so. However, if you want to take off your website, you can surely do the same thing.
- Perhaps you are facing some issues with your Wix website speed and some maintenance work will be needed for this matter.
- The last reason might simply be that you don’t want to use Wix anymore and you want to try out new platforms such as WordPress or Shopify to create the website. However, you are not still sure about the other platform. As a result, you don’t want to delete the website but unpublish it until things get better.
There could be a couple of more reasons for unpublish the website. This depends on your situation.
How to Unpublish Wix site?
Now, let’s jump into the actual steps on how to unpublish the Wix site. It is easy and fast. You just need a couple of seconds to unpublish your website. We will also see some of the more things after this.
Here are the exact steps that you need to take to unpublish a Wix site. Open Wix and log in to your account. (of course)
Now, you need to go to the “My Sites” option. You can select the website from the given list. It will display all the websites that you have own or you have created using Wix. Click on the website that you want to unpublish. You will see the edit option; you can also click on it. Either way, it will redirect you to the same page.
You will now see the dashboard of your website. Click on “Settings” from the left menu. You will see a couple of options inside it. By default, “Overview” many will be selected. Keep it as it is and head over to the screen. You will see the option to unpublish the website. There is an option called “Publish status”. You will see another option to unpublish the website besides it.
That’s pretty much it. Once you click on it, it will unpublish the website. It will just take few seconds to unpublish the Wix site. You will see the message that says your website has been unpublished. You will be asked to confirm the section before you unpublish. Thereafter, you can continue with your work. Once the work is completed, you can publish the website again.
Publishing Wix website After Unpublishing it
This is not needed people but still if you are wondering how you can publish your website back.
You can publish it from the editing panel. When you are editing your website, you will see the option to publish the website from there. It is just like the way you first published your website.
Here are detailed steps to do it.
Go to the “My Site” option and click on the edit site button.
Inside it, you will see the publish button.
Make sure you make the changes before you hit the publish button. You can’t just republish your website by doing the same steps you used to unpublish your website.
Disadvantages of Publishing Wix Site
Now, let’s see the dark side of unpublish the Wix site. Unpublishing might sound cool but it has a couple of disadvantages that you should be aware of. Here, we will see the drawbacks of publishing the website.
- Your visitors won’t be able to visit your website. Some of them might just disappear. Nobody likes a website that is not opening. Chances are your visitors won’t even open your website.
- Other than visitors, your next job is to make sure that the search engine doesn’t push down your rankings. Some of the major search engines including Google won’t rank your website if your website is down for so many days. It is found to unpublish the website for some hours. However, if the hours turn into days, you might be in the problem. You will not only lose visitors but you might also lose the rankings.
So, there are many disadvantages that you might want to keep in mind. If you don’t have any issues with this, you can continue to unpublish your website. It is easy and fast.
Alternatives to Unpushing your Website
But what if you don’t want to unpublish the website, is there any other way to do it? Of course, there is. There are two alternatives that you can use instead of unpublishing the Wix site. We will be seeing some of the ways which work the best. You will surely fall into one of these categories. So, you don’t need to unpublish the website, instead, you can do these things.
Use Coming Soon Page
Coming soon page or the maintenance page is specially made for things like this. A coming soon page is a page made especially for such cases. Here, you can publish the coming soon page as the homepage. It will have the message as well as the timer on when the website will be ready to use.
A coming soon page won’t have any menu and navigation link. So, the visitor won’t be able to use any of the extra pages. They will just see the current page. You can edit the text and the countdown on that page to suite your needs.
It will give your visitors a confirmation about the website. So, if your visitors know that the website will live after 3 days and it will be ready to use, they will stick around. Instead, if you directly unpublish your website, you might lose the visitors.
Also, Google and other search engines won’t decrease your rankings.
So, if possible, you should use this page instead of unpublishing your website. This is more beneficial to all the people. That’s the main reason why you should be using the coming soon page. There are various designs available in the Wix that you can choose from. You can modify it and set it as a homepage.
Further, you can also take emails from the coming soon page. You can send an email to your subscribers once your website is live. In this way, your visitors won’t need to remember the date. They will get the email once your website is live and running. Don’t forget to change the text and images on the coming soon page. There are various templates to choose the design.
Allowing Users with Direct Link to Open the Website
Now, this is a little tricky and not recommended for most people out there. If you want your site visitors to allow surf your website but you don’t want them to find your website in Google search, you can restrict it.
With this, the visitors will only be able to visit your website if they have a direct link to your website. If they don’t have the link, they won’t find the website. Wix will stop the search engines from ranking or indexing your website.
This is not recommended if you want to allow search engines to find your website in the future. This is because once you prevent the search engine from indexing your website, thereafter, it will take a lot of time to reindex your website. So, this is not at all recommended if you want search engines to rank your website in the future.
If you still wish to do it, you can head over to Settings > Overview. You will see the search engine options there. Click on the Manage button and then disallow the search engine from ranking your website. In this way, the search engine won’t rank your website. Only the visitors who have a direct link to your website will be able to visit your website. Not to mention, users can surely share it on social media. So, it will not work as a completely private website.
Also, it is up to the search engine whether to respect the command or not. Search engines might rank or index your website even if you disallow it.
Again, this is NOT recommended for most people as they will need search traffic in the future. You can instead use the maintenance or the coming soon page instead.
Final Words
To conclude, this was all you need to know about the unpublishing Wix site. We saw why you need to unpublish and how to unpublish the Wix site. Further, we saw some of the alternatives that you can use instead of unpublish your website. Most people out there will use the coming soon page instead of unpublishing. It works best.
If you are planning to change the platform and that’s why you want to unpublish, you can try WordPress or Shopify. Shopify is awesome if you want to create a shopping website whereas if you want to create a multi-purpose website or a blog with better control, you can use WordPress. It allows you to customize your website in whichever way you want.
Lastly, it is up to you what choice you want to make. Don’t forget to publish the website once the work is done.
