I ran into a little problem today that I thought would demand a little coding. The problem was fairly simple. I needed to Hide a Wordpress page on my blog.

I wanted to create a payment page on my blog. Not so difficult but I did not want it to be visible on the menu or indexed by the search engines. This is not so difficult if you know a bit of code but I just found out that it is a lot quicker and easier with WordPress plug-ins.

Hide A WordPress Page So That It Doesn’t Appear In The Search Results

I already use WordPress SEO by Yoast. This plug-in allows you to set individual pages or posts to no-index and no-follow, without the need for coding experience. This is done by clicking on the advanced tab and selecting the options as shown in the image below.

To Hide a WordPress page from the search results. In the page editor, select the advanced tab in SEO By Yoast. Set the top two options to no-index and no-follow as seen above.

Remove The Page From The WordPress Menu

The next step was to insert some code that would stop my page being added to the menu. I decided to see if there was a plug-in for this. As always, there were several to chose from.

Plug-ins can slow your page load speeds down and I already have quite a few installed. For that reason, I decided that as I already had the options to set no-index and no-follow through Yoast’s plug-in, I would go for something lightweight. Something that simply removes the pages from the menu. There are several plug-ins that will do both.

The Plugin I chose was Exclude Pages by Simon Heatly. This is a nice simple plug-in that adds a check-box in the WordPress page editor. The check-box is set to show the page by default. To hide a page from the search engines, you just un-check the box.

If you are going to use this plugin, it is worth noting that if you hide a parent page, the child pages are also hidden. You should bare this in mind when creating hidden pages.

Have you had reason to hide a WordPress page or post? Maybe you had another problem that you found a suitable plug-in for. Why not tell us about your solution in the comment area below.

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