New websites on WordPress.com will display a “Coming Soon” page by default, so your unfinished site won’t be visible to the public until you launch it. This guide explains how to show the Coming Soon page and share a preview link while you are working on your site.
In this guide
To set your website to display a “Coming Soon” page, follow these steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings → General (or Hosting → Site Settings if using WP-Admin).
- Under the “Privacy” section, select the “Coming Soon” button.
- If you do not see the “Privacy” section, you have yet to launch your site.
- Click the “Save settings” button.
Members of the public can visit your website, but they will see only the following “Coming Soon” page, indicating your site is a work in progress:
While your site is in “Coming Soon” mode, you can share it with select people to review, enabling you to show off your work-in-progress and get feedback while you continue to work on the website.
This section of the guide applies to sites with the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plan, and the legacy Pro plan. If you have a Business plan, make sure to activate it. For sites on the Free, Personal, and Premium plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.
To create a preview link, follow the below steps:
- Visit your dashboard.
- On the side, navigate to Settings → General (or Hosting → Site Settings if using WP-Admin).
- For a site that has not been launched yet, locate the “Launch site” section.
- For a site that has already been launched, locate the “Privacy” section and ensure the site is in Coming Soon mode.
- Generate the preview link by clicking on the “Share site” toggle button.
- Click the “Copy” button to copy the preview link to share it with anyone you would like.
To turn off the “Coming Soon” page, take the following steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings → General (or Hosting → Site Settings if using WP-Admin).
- Under the “Privacy” section, select either Public or Private options.
- Click the “Save settings” button.
If you have a plugin-enabled site and do not see the Coming Soon option in Privacy Settings, ensure the WordPress.com Editing Toolkit plugin is active on your site.
To make your own ‘Under Construction’ or ‘Maintenance’ page instead of the blue WordPress.com option, you can install a plugin that provides this option. Search the plugin repository for “maintenance” to choose from many options.
