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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.
First of all, you will need to make a new page for your holding page, to do this, please follow the steps below:
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:
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:
User-agent: *
Disallow:/
Save the file exactly as "robots.txt"
Then, to upload it and replace the Create one, please follow the steps below:
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.
Once you are ready, you will just need to publish your website!
A great example of a holding page can be seen below:
In order to start working on your additional pages now, you can first make your homepage back to being your homepage again by:
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:
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:
Now just republish your website to write over your holding page!
If you have any further questions, please get in touch and we will be happy to help.
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