Publish or hide your site

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Publish or hide your site

Last updated September 10, 2026 13:36

Show your website to visitors, add a site-wide password for privacy, or hide your site while you build your content.

Use Site Availability to control who sees your site. You can hide your site 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.

Also try: making your site more visible to search engines or publishing or hiding individual pages

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Publish your site

When your site is public, all visitors can access your site from any connected domain.

To publish your site:

1. Ensure your site is on a paid subscription.
2. Open the Site Availability panel.
3. Select Public.
4. Click Save.

What changes when my site is published?

After publishing your site, search engines can find and index your site. You can ask that Google or Bing reindex your site right after publishing to make sure the search results are accurate.

If you set up an online store and you’ve connected a payment processor, customers can now place orders.

Also try: sharing your site on social media.

Add a password to share your site with some visitors

When your site is password-protected, visitors see a prompt to enter the password. Anyone you give the password to can enter it and view your site. You can use this setting on trial or paid sites. On a trial site, you can share your site with visitors after you add a password.

To hide your site with a password:

1. Open the Site Availability panel.
2. Select Password Protected.
3. In the Password field, enter your site’s password.
4. Click Save.

How can I hide some of my pages?

If you don't want to hide all of your site with a password, you can hide some of your pages with page-specific passwords.

Hide your site from visitors

You can set your site to private at any time to hide it from visitors. Making your site private helps when you’re still building your site, or to temporarily hide your site while you change the content. When your site is private, only site owners and contributors with login permissions can visit it. All sites are set to private by default.

To hide your site from visitors:

1. Open the Site Availability panel.
2. Select Private.
3. Click Save.

What do visitors see when my site is hidden?

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

What happens with search engines when my site is private?

When your site is private, search engines can’t find or index it. 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.

Also try: Hiding your site from search results or excluding your site from AI scans.

Allow only employees to access your site

If you manage a company site on the Enterprise or Premium 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. Set up SSO access and then turn it on in the site availability panel.

Tell us if you want us to promote your site

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.

To allow us to promote your site, in the Website panel of your site's settings, switch the Allow Squarespace Promotion toggle on.

I can’t change my site availability status

If you can't change your site's availability, check your site's SEO description. If it exceeds 300 characters, shorten it to 300 characters or fewer, then try changing your availability status again.

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Publish or hide your site