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Coming soon mode

What visitors see before your site launches, how to share a preview with your team, and how to go live when you're ready.

Every new website starts in coming soon mode, so you can build it in private before anyone sees it. While it's on, visitors land on a simple placeholder instead of your real site, and search engines are told not to list it yet.

What visitors see

A clean page with your logo, a headline and your message, in your site's own fonts and colours, plus whatever you choose to show alongside them:

  • An opening date, if you've set one.
  • Your opening hours, taken from your venue's hours in the main app.
  • A menu button that opens your menu right on the page, or links to a menu somewhere else.
  • A newsletter signup, so interested visitors can leave their email before you're open.
  • Your social links.

The page also uses your site's icon in the browser tab, if you've set one under Settings → General.

None of your real pages are reachable while coming soon mode is on. Almost everything a visitor tries lands on this placeholder; a few technical addresses — the ones search engines use — simply come back empty instead. Either way, nothing of your site shows through.

Sharing a preview

You don't have to wait until launch to show people your work. Open Settings on your site and find the Coming soon section — it has a preview link you can copy and send to anyone: a business partner, a designer, a client. Anyone with that link sees the real site, exactly as visitors will once you launch, even while coming soon mode is still on for everyone else.

The banner across your website admin pages has a Preview button that opens the same thing, if that's quicker than going via Settings.

A preview lasts for the recipient's browsing session, so if they close their browser they'll need to open the link again.

If you've shared a link more widely than you meant to, click Create a new link — the old one stops working immediately, for everyone currently using it, and you get a fresh one to share instead.

Setting it up

From Settings → Coming soon, you can change:

  • The headline and main text shown on the placeholder. Leave a blank line in the main text to start a new paragraph.
  • The background colour and text colour. Leave them blank to use your site's own colours.
  • The logo: your company logo, a different image from your media library, or no logo (your site's name shows instead).
  • An optional opening date — this is only shown to visitors as information; it doesn't launch your site automatically. You still launch it yourself, whenever you're ready.
  • Opening hours — turn them on, choose the venue and give the list a heading. This works even before the venue is open for orders.
  • A menu button — choose Show a menu on this page to let visitors open your published menu without leaving the placeholder (they can read it, but nothing can be ordered from it, and it works before your venue is open), or Link to a menu somewhere else for a PDF or another website. You can change the button's text.
  • Whether the newsletter signup and social links appear.

Launching your site

When you're ready for the world to see it, a banner across your website admin pages says the site is in coming soon mode and offers a one-click Launch site button — no confirmation step, so it's just as easy to turn off as it was to leave on. Once you launch, visitors see your real site straight away.

Changed your mind, or need to make more changes privately? Turn coming soon mode back on any time from Settings → Coming soon.

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