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I’m trying to take my WP-based site offline for a while, but don’t want to have a Maintenance Mode or Coming Soon show up. Just a blank page. I was told to just drop a blank index.html into the site’s root directory. Will that do the trick, and prevent search engines from crawling the site while it’s down?
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You could certainly drop an index.html file in the root, but you’ll also need to setup an htaccess (307 – temporary redirect) rule to redirect all URLs to that file, otherwise anyone not arriving via the homepage will get a 404.
The 307 should preserve your SEO for a little while, but I’d imagine that after a few months google will just start dropping your pages from its index.
[https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/307-redirect/#http-307-redirects-and-seo])