How and why to pause your Weebly website

I had a client ask me what to do with her website if she decided to take a temporary break from her business. I checked with Weebly Support for their advice and they suggested these three steps:

Create a new page that announces the pause and make that page your new Home page.
Hide your other pages and exclude them from search indexing.
You may also be able to downgrade your billing plan.

Create a new page that announces your business change

The new Home page will be the only page on your new version of the website. The design of the page should look similar to the rest of the website and your brand, using the same fonts and colors. It should contain:

The announcement text and any images to get the message across.
Brief information about what your business is about, for someone who finds you for the first time.
The date when you will return, if you know it.
Your contact information, unless you don’t want to be contacted during your break.

To make the Announcement page your new Home page, go to the Pages editor in your website. Slide the new page to be the topmost page. Then Publish. When people go to your site or find it in a search, this will be the page they see.

Hide the rest of the pages on your site

You won’t want any other pages to be accessible while you are on your break, so you must hide them. In the page settings for each page, select “Hide in navigation.” Then open SEO settings for the page, scroll down, and select “Hide this page from search engines.”

Publish the site to make the changes public.

See if you can downgrade your plan

Weebly has a variety of plans and they make it hard to figure out which one you have if you want to make a change. Support told me that the price of each plan and the features available to you depend on the account type, the plan type, and when you subscribed.

Contact Weebly Support to see if you can downgrade your plan for the time being. Note that downgrading your plan means that when you return to business, you will need to upgrade again to have access to all the features that your original website used.

Another more drastic pause for your Weebly website

While I don’t recommend it, Weebly gives you an option to save more money if you are willing to take your website offline entirely by unpublishing it and unsubscribing from a plan. Weebly will continue to keep your website files available but you will need to subscribe and pay for a plan to publish the site again. Some plans will even let you pause your website for three months, but you won’t know until you click the Unsubscribe option. (Find this option by logging in to Weebly, selecting the dropdown on the top right where you see your website name, and selecting Account Settings. To see your plan, click My Services. To see the Unsubscribe options, click Subscription Manage.)

How will you handle inquiries during your break?

You’ll want to consider how to handle inquiries that come in to your business phone or email. Even if you’ve omitted contact information from your Announcement page, people can still find you through searches or social media.

Add a message to your phone that tells people you are on a break and let them know how you will handle inquiries during this time.

Add an auto-response to your incoming email that tells people you are on a break and let them know how you will follow up, if at all. You might also consider auto-forwarding messages from your business email to your personal email to make sure you don’t miss anything critical, such as billing notices.

You may also need to respond to regular postage mail. If you will not be around to pick up your mail, consider setting up a temporary mail-forwarding instruction through the USPS.

Let your subscribers and followers know

Your mailing list subscribers and social media followers will want to know what’s happening with you and your business. Send out a mailing that includes the announcement of your break. Post an announcement on your social media pages letting people know you are taking a break. Your social following may take a hit during the break, but your loyal followers will return when you do.

Don’t forget Google

When your website has been slimmed down to a one-page site, it’s a good idea to submit your sitemap (sitemap.xml) to Google again. That will get the process started of Google understanding that your site has just the one page. This decreases the chance over time of people getting search results that go to pages on your site that you disabled.

If you have a Google My Business listing, announce the temporary closure there too. Sign in to your Google My Business profile and under Info, select the Close option of “Temporarily mark as closed.”

Opening the business again

When you are ready to start up again, you’ll reverse the process above:

Reinstate your website.
- Upgrade your Weebly plan, if applicable, to what you had before.
- Move your old Home page to the top of the page list to become the new Home page.
- Remove the “Hide in navigation” setting for any pages that should be seen in the navigation menu.
- Remove the “Hide this page from search engines” in the SEO settings for each page.
- Delete the announcement page.
- Publish.
Open your regular contact channels.
- Remove or change the auto-response message on your phone.
- Remove or change the auto-response message on your email. Discontinue auto-forwarding to your personal email address.
- Stop any forwarding of your postage mail.
Give your subscribers and followers the good news that you’re back in a mailing and on social media.
Submit your reinstated sitemap to Google and reset your Google My Business listing to Open.

When I was a youngish technical writer, I worked for Lotus, Inc., a software company in Cambridge, MA, which was the inventor of a popular spreadsheet program called Lotus 1-2-3. In the high-tech heyday of the 1980s and ‘90s, we were given a one-month sabbatical on our 6th and our 12th years at the company. I have some wonderful memories of that special time off, including my one-and-only trip to Hawaii with my then five-year-old son. If you’re feeling like it’s time for you to have a sabbatical to refresh and recharge, know that your business can take a pause too until you’re ready to turn the lights back on.