Categories
Tutorials

Launching Your Site

Updated May 27, 2025

Overview

For sites on our WordPress network, there are a few items that you should review and some settings that you should change to make your site ready for visitors.

Prior to launch, make sure you:

  • Delete all sample content.
  • Make your site visible to the public.
  • Review University web requirements.

Delete the sample Page and sample Post

When created, your blog likely had one sample post (“Hello World!”) and one sample page (“Sample Page”). Make sure you Trash those.

These pages will show up in your site search. Search engines, like Google or Bing, will also index these pages and show them in search results, even if you are not using them.

Sample post: Hello world! Welcome to Princeton WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

University web requirements

It is your responsibility, as a publisher of web content on Princeton University web servers, to be familiar with:

Site visibility

Update: For sites created after May 2025, your site is set to be “Visible only to registered users of this site.”  This allows your site to be private while you create your initial content and prepare your site for launch.

If you need to share your initial progress with visitors who do not have an account or role on your site, you can go to Settings → Reading, and change the site visibility settings to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.”

When you are finally ready to launch, you can change the site visibility settings to “Allow search engines to index this site.”

Comments

Update: For sites created after May 2025, we disable comments on posts by default. Many informational websites do not need visitor feedback published to pages. Spammers will abuse public comment forms, making them less effective for community engagement.

Sample spam comment from Totally Legit Person. Thank you for sharing this insightful and informative post. This has provided me with great inspiration! For more inspiration, please visit shadymarketing dot com.

Site admins do have the option to go to Settings → Discussion to allow people to submit comments on new posts. If you choose to enable comments, we recommend that you only allow registered members of the site network (those with Princeton netIDs) to leave a comment. Additionally, all comments should be set to be moderated and approved by a site administrator before they are visible to other site visitors.

If you allow public comments and/or turn off automatic moderation, your organization must designate an individual to actively monitor all incoming comments for your site and remove or edit any comments that are abusive, harassing, of a purely commercial nature (spam), or are otherwise harmful to the image and reputation of Princeton University.

Temporary addresses

If your site was a migration from another site, we may have set up your new site with a temporary address. Please email webservices@princeton.edu, and we will assist you with the address transfer from your old site to your new site.