Hiding content

There are several ways to hide something, and they do different things. Pick by what you want hidden and from whom.

To hide	Use	Where
A whole page from the public	Keep it in Draft, or Archive it	Workflow, in the page sidebar
A page from site search, the sitemap or search engines	Search exclude, the sitemap setting, or a robots meta tag	Page sidebar; see Excluding from search
Parts of a page's layout — banner, breadcrumb, sidebar, print button…	The Hide field	Page sidebar
A component's heading, keeping it for assistive technology	Hide heading	The component's header fields
A whole component, temporarily	The Hide Modifier	The component's Presentation group
A component on phones only, or on desktops only	The Hide Modifier with a Media query	As above
A component from everyone but certain audiences	The Audience Visibility Modifier	As above; see Personalisation
A menu link without deleting the page	Untick Enabled on the link	Navigation

The Hide field on a page:

The Hide field

Three things hiding does not do:

• Hide and the Hide Modifier only stop things being displayed. The content is still in the page's HTML and still reachable by anyone who has the address. For anything confidential, unpublish it.

• The Hide Modifier is not a scheduling tool. A component hidden "for now" is easy to forget; put a note in the component's Title so it shows in the edit form.

• Hiding a heading does not remove it from the page structure — that is the point. To remove the heading entirely, clear the Heading field instead.