Temporarily suspend a blog?

A very dirty solution could be to move ALL the blog files into a subfolder, and move them back to the root folder of your domain when you want to use your blog again.
By SSH, mv * subdir , and when you want to use your blog again, by ssh, mv subdir/* ./
And have either subdir to he a hidden directory, or have htaccess rule state that the index of the folder isn’t shown to visitors.

If you can’t do SSH operations or you’re unfamiliar with it, however, then I don’t know how to do it, sorry.

I’m certain there are sexier and better solutions, but my trick would require 30 seconds of work to hide or un-hide a blog, assuming you’re familiar with ssh and command-line operations ??

You could just rename index.php in your root WordPress folder to something else (index.bak for example). When you need access again, just change it back.

You could also put an index.html file in your root. Apache normally serves index.html before index.php. However, if your server is setup to send index.php first, you would have to add this to your .htaccess:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

WordPress also has a built-in maintenance mode:

https://sivel.net/2009/06/wordpress-maintenance-mode-without-a-plugin/

Damn, I wish I knew it before, Big Bagel ! Thanks, finally that thread was also useful for me ??

Thanks guys, you have been very helpful.

If I were to rename my index.php or use the built in maintenance mode, will the search engine still crawl through the contents of my suspended site?

No, spiders have to find a link to the site first, then the page has to actually exist (It won’t publicly exist if you do any of the previously mentioned things). If you’re really worried about it you can set the appropriate option in Settings > Privacy.

Thank Bagel. ??