Non Published Wordpress Pages

[aua]

Hi,

Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published. Can it like slow the site down or does it not matter? Someone in my dept. has so many pages started/not complete and besides being messy, I wonder if it has any negative impact on the site.

Thanks

[Dalessi]

Hello, in WordPress because everything is based on the Database, in my opinion, it is not helpful to have an extraordinary amount of unpublished pages. If the pages are unpublished and are not indexable you should be ok with the search engines, but I think it is not a good practice to get into. Also if the unfinished pages are resource heavy and have a lot of images that take up space it may start to slow the general operation of the site, especially if you are on shared hosting with limited resources.

[Moreleads]

Hi Aua,

Since speed is a ranking factor for Google anything influencing this speed negatively would theoretically be bad for SEO.   I don´t know how many are "too many" but if you are talking about several dozens that shouldn´t really impact that much.  It isn´t good practice though to leave not completed unpublished posts in your site, and usually not necessary, to keep a clean database it would be better to finish them off site on an editor and insert them in your site when they are done.

Hope this helps

[Roman-Delcarmen]

First Question
Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published?

As long as you setup the hidden content as a "no index"
you will not have any problem.

If your are using worpress and Yoast SEO plugin,
you should set up all the articles and post
that you want to hide properly. What that means?
Means that if you did no set the content as "No Index" and "No Follow"
Im pretty sure Google is indexing dummy content
of your website

Go to your articles a set this parameters

• Meta robots index - No index
• Meta robots follow - No follow

So you need to make sure the Search Engine
is not indexing irrelevant content.

How can you do that?
it is very simple you just use a basic search operaror (write on your browser)

site:www.yoursite.com (Search Operator) > There are many useful tricks

This will show you how many pages you have indexed on Google
Example if you have 10 useful pages and 20 dummy content pages of course it will hurt your SEO.

So to make sure, go to your Search Console > Google Index > Remove URL and remove those pages that you want to hide or delele.

Talking about the second question (speed)
Nowaday the speed has become in a relevant factor on SEO,
that is the main reason for the existence of Google AMP, the next year Google will replace
the destop search results by mobile search results (mobile first)
and on mobiles speed it really matters.

If my answer were useful don't forget to mark it as a good answer
Cheers

[R0bin_L0rd]

William and Ramon have good answers here. Roman also has good points  but some of it may be a bit confusing for this thread because it's not fully explained. If the pages haven't been published they shouldn't be indexable to Google based on standard Wordpress functionality. Having a bunch of messy unfinished pages could slow down use of the cms (if only because you have to paginate through them) but as Will and Ramon have said they're unlikely to slow down the site front end unless they are truly huge amounts.

Most relevant is the opportunity cost for not having all those pages published, if they aren't published they can't rank. So if you're posting this to get reasoning to finish the work I'd start by considering the keywords those pages are targeting; use semrush, stat, or similar and pull out the search volume for the keywords. Then you can point to what you're accumulatively missing out on.

Hope that helps