Guide
Take your website offline or close it
Facts checked Oct 9, 2026
To take your website offline for a while, hide it behind a password or a "back soon" page. To close it, save your content first and keep your domain and email.
Which one is it?
- Closed for a season, or rebuilding
- Hide it for a while and keep paying for the plan.
- Moving to a new website
- Don't close the old one until the new one is live: moving to a new site.
- Stopping the website, keeping the email
- Close the website, and keep the domain your email uses.
- Closing the business or group
- Save everything, tell people, then close it. Keep the domain for a while, so nobody else picks it up and gets your old links and emails.
Take it offline for a while
- Password-protect the whole site. Most builders have a setting for this (look for "site visibility", "site availability", "private mode" or "password"). Visitors see a password page instead.
- Unpublish it. Some builders let you take the site down without cancelling. Visitors usually see "page not found". Your plan and domain keep running.
- On WordPress: use a "coming soon" or "maintenance mode" setting from your host, or a plugin. Ask your web person if you're not sure which you have.
- Leave a message. If the password or holding page lets you add words, say when you'll be back and how to reach you.
If you can, keep the site up and switch off only what you need to: turn off the shop's checkout, or add a banner saying you're closed until a date. Google says hiding a whole site can drop it out of search, and there's no fixed time for it to come back.
Close it for good
- Save your content. Copy your words into a document and download your pictures. Export what the builder lets you: blog posts, products, contacts, orders, form entries. Most builders can't export the design, and some can only export some kinds of page.
- Save your records. Download invoices and order history you may need for taxes.
- Tell people. Put a notice on the home page a few weeks before, with where to find you next.
- List everything the account pays for. On many builders the domain, the email, a mailing list or a booking app are separate subscriptions. Cancelling the website plan often leaves them running and renewing.
- Cancel the website plan. Visitors then see the builder's "expired" or "not available" page (here's what Squarespace shows). Many builders keep your site for a while in case you come back.
- Delete it last, if at all, once you're sure you have everything.
Keep your domain (and your email)
Your domain name (yourshop.com) is a separate thing from your website plan, even when you bought it from the same company.
- If your email uses the domain (you@yourshop.com), losing the domain stops your email.
- Keep it renewing: auto-renew on, a card that works, an email address you read. Domain name expired? has the three checks.
- You can keep it where it is, or move it to another company. Your current company may refuse a move within 60 days of registering or last moving it.
- Point it somewhere useful: the new website, a simple one-page site, or a social media page (most domain companies call this "forwarding").
- If you let it go, anyone can register it once it fully lapses, and old links and emails sent to it then reach them.
Moving to a new website
- Build the new site and check it on a phone and a computer.
- Point your domain at the new site. The new site's help pages list the settings.
- Send each old page address to its new page with a redirect, so old links and Google results still work.
- Check nothing broke, then cancel the old website plan, and only the website plan.
Send this to your web person
Not sure what to say? Copy this into an email, add your website's address, and send it.
Hi, We're [closing / pausing] our website, [your website address], from [the date]. Before anything is cancelled, could you: 1. Export our pages, pictures, blog posts, form entries and any customer or order records, and send them to me. 2. Tell me where our domain name is registered, whose account it's in, and when it renews. We want to keep it. 3. Make sure our email keeps working. 4. Put up a page that says: [your message, and where people can find you]. 5. Send me a list of every subscription tied to the website, so I cancel only the right ones. Thanks
What PageKiwi can check
Who hosts this website? shows where your domain is registered and who runs your website and email, so you know which accounts to look in. Site health shows when your domain renews. After a move, Link Check finds old links that no longer work.