Starting your WordPress site is a very exciting thing. However, you may not want others to be able to see your site until it's complete. 

Hiding your site can easily be done with the right plugin. A good WordPress Plugin will give you an "under construction" or "coming soon" page instead of your actual website. Here are the top two plugins designed to hide your website until development is completed.

<h2>underConstruction WordPress Plugin</h2>

The underConstruction plugin has been downloaded nearly 600,000 times. It has a 4.9 out of 5.0 star rating and provides just what you need to hide our website during development. 

You can easily install the plugin just like any other WordPress plugin. Once it's installed, you will need to activate the plugin and turn it on. Just activating the plugin won't give you an "under construction" page. 

Go to <strong>Settings &gt;&gt; Under Construction</strong> and change the "Activate or Deactivate" option to "on."

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/UnderConstructionActivate1.png" alt="Under Construction Activate" width="243" height="154" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6334" />

Make sure you click "Save Changes." The Display Options of this plugin will also allow you to use your own HTML or customize the text for this page. This works great if you need to give potential clients a way to contact you. 

The default page looks like this:

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/DefaultUnderConstructionPage1.png" alt="Default Under ConstructionP age" width="547" height="270" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6333" />

You can customize this however you need with the other two options:

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ChangeUnderConstructionPage.png" alt="Change Under Construction Page" width="460" height="233" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6330" />

<h2>Ultimate Coming Soon Page</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/UltimateComingSoonPage.png" alt="Ultimate Coming Soon Page" width="472" height="255" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6329" />

Another choice you can use for a different type of page is the Ultimate Coming Soon Page plugin. This plugin has been downloaded nearly 700,000 times and has a 4.7 out of 5.0 star rating. Easily install and activate this plugin when you're ready to start development.

After activation, go to <strong>Settings &gt;&gt; Coming Soon</strong> and click the "Yes" box for the enable option.

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/EnableComingSoon1.png" alt="Enable Coming Soon" width="429" height="137" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6335" />

The settings screen for this plugin will also allow you to write a custom headline, description and use a custom image. Without these options, you will just have a blank page. However, the Ultimate Coming Soon Page plugin makes it much easier to customize your page than the underConstruction plugin does.

The page will look like this:

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ComingSoonPreview.png" alt="Coming Soon Preview" width="588" height="194" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6332" />

This plugin also allows for a Pro upgrade, which makes it easy to use custom sign up forms from an auto responder and many other options.

Both of these plugins allow you to put your website in development mode, while you're building a new site or making major changes. If you're looking for a way to hide your site during development, either plugin will do the job for you.