Help Centre

Setting up a holding page or 'coming soon' page is a great way to get your website online and begin ranking in search engines while establishing some interest in your website.

A holding page is essentially a soft launch of your website while you build it. It's usually one page that says a little something like "Coming Soon" and includes some contact details so any interested customers can contact you if they wish!

In this guide, we will be covering the steps needed to make your holding page while you build your website.

Getting Started

First of all, you will need to make a new page for your holding page, to do this, please follow the steps below:

1. Log in to your account
2. Select "Content" from the top menu
3. Click "Add Page"
4. Click "Content Page" 
5. Add your "Page Title" as something like "Holding Page"
6. Click the "Display" tab running along the top of the window
7. Set the "Hide Template" option to "YES"
8. Click "Save Changes"

Your page will now be added to your Content screen. Edit your new holding page and add any text and images that you want to display.

You will now need to temporarily make your holding page your homepage. To do this please follow these steps:

1. Click "Content" from the Top Menu
2. Click the "Page Settings" icon next to your homepage
3. You should see the "Use As Homepage:" option, select "YES"
4. Click "Save Changes".

Blocking the rest of your pages from the search engines

Before you publish, if you don't want any of the other pages you make to start appearing on the search engines, you will need to stop them from being indexed using something called a robots.txt file.

To make this, please follow these steps:

1. On your computer, open your NotePad program (or TextEdit on a Mac).
2. Copy and paste the following into your blank NotePad document:

User-agent: *

Disallow:/

Save the file exactly as "robots.txt"

Then, to upload it and replace the Create one, please follow the steps below:

1. Click "Content" from the top menu
2. Click on "Files" from the left-hand menu
3. Upload your new robots.txt file here

Your robots.txt will now be changed. If you need any help with this, please let your Account Manager know and they will be happy to set that up for you.

Publish your holding page

Once you are ready, you will just need to publish your website!

A great example of a holding page can be seen below:

Working on your website

In order to start working on your additional pages now, you can first make your homepage back to being your homepage again by:

1. Click "Content" from the Top Menu.
2. Click the "Page Options" icon next to your homepage
3. Under "Use As Homepage:", switch to "YES"
4. Click Save Changes.

You may also now want to hide your holding page, you can read how to hide your a page from your website's menu here.

Now, any changes you make to your website will not go live until you publish your website again. So you can view your working progress by previewing your website.

To preview your website just:

1. Click "Publish" from the top menu
2. Click "Preview Site"
3. Your website's preview will now appear in a new window in your browser.

Unblock the search engines

Once you are ready to go live, you will need to unblock the search engines with your robots file again. To do this we will just need to delete the robots file we added earlier by following these steps:

1. Click "Content" from the top menu
2. Click on "Files" from the left-hand menu
3. Click the trash icon next to your robots.txt
4. Click "Yes - Delete".

Go live

Now just republish your website to write over your holding page!