About Your Unlaunched Site

When you first get your new site on Stanford Sites, the site is not yet public. 

Stanford Sites puts some safeguards in place that balance the need to hide the site while it is in development, while still allowing you to take advantage of all of the content management tools you will need to prepare it for its intended use.

• An unpublished homepage. This will prevent crawlers from easily finding your site. You can still create other published pages for review or use the Site Reviewer role to share unpublished pages with reviewers.
• "sites"  in the URL. This is a provisional URL that you can use while developing the site, but it should never be circulated as the final site address.
• Search traffic blocked. This will keep your site pages from being indexed by Google, Bing, and other search engines until you are ready to share your site with the world.
• Unlaunched site banner: Tour site will have banner that indicates the site is "under construction." If someone comes across one of your pages, it will be clear that this site is not an official or complete site.

Make your site public

To make your site public, we perform a "launch." When the site is launched the following changes are made:

• The homepage is published
• The appropriate three- or four-part domain is added to the site
• The site is added in Siteimprove, which will scan the site for accessibility, broken links, and more
• If needed, the site theme may be changed to comply with Stanford's branding requirements
• The block for search engines is removed, unless continued blocking is requested during the launch  

Learn more about site launches

Intranets

There are some differences in this approach for Stanford Sites Intranet. Intranets are not findable by search engines or large language models. They also cannot be scanned by Siteimprove. When we launch intranets, we add the three- or four-part domain.

If you need to lock down your intranet to a smaller group while building the site, talk to your Stanford Web Services contact about making some temporary changes to the access settings for the site.