Launching A New Website

apollo11 If you are building new websites, like setting up new blogs, you probably don’t want to show Google or other visitors it before everything (templates, links, descriptions, meta tags, etc.) is completely set up.

For example, when you install WordPress, there is a default Hello World post displayed on the front page and Google also indexes your important login page. This is all the stuff you don’t need to show to anyone.

One solution to prevent such case is to test your website on localhost on your home computer but reuploading files and databases from home to your hosting account can add up quite some time and you cannot be sure that everything go smoothly.

One good way to test a website and fine tune it before final launch is to use .htaccess file to allow see the content only yourself. This way ensures that nobody else including web spiders and robots can see the website until you allow.

To ban everybody from seeing your new unfinished site do:

  1. Open (or create if it doesn’t exist) .htaccess file from the root directory of your site. (Root directory is where your main index.html file resides. If you are building new sites like addon domains on your main hosting, your root directory is that addon domain’s folder which is usually in /public_html/youaddondomainfolder)
  2. Add this code at the end of the .htaccess file (it will deny everybody that tries to visit yournewdomain.com)
    Deny from All
  3. Now Google for My Ip and copy your IP address. Then add more code to the .htaccess file
    Allow from “replace this with your IP address”
  4. Save your .htaccess file and reload your browser with yournewdomain.com. You should see website as normally but other people will see this screen:

forbidden-screen

This trick works only if you have static IP address. You can allways unblock access to your website by deleting code above.


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