If you have just started working on your new website, chances are that that your site and content are not perfect yet, and you don't want to show that to someone, right? The same thing applies to search engines, you don't want to show your website to them until you are ready to have people come visit your site.
If you think that search engines can't find your website simply because you haven't submitted the website to Google Search Console, you are unfortunately wrong. Search Engines are sneaky and do not work just on links, they also work on content, which means that search engines can find your website and index it, even though you may not want them to do that.
Worry not. Stopping search engines from crawling your site is an easy task. Below I will show you the easiest way to discourage search engines from indexing your website in their search results.
Discouraging Search Engines From Indexing WordPress
The easiest way to prevent search engines from crawling your website is to change a simple setting in WordPress called Search Engine Visibility.
To change the setting, open your WordPress Admin (wp-admin) and navigate to Settings > Reading and the scroll down to Search Engine Visibility.
Check the box that says Discourage search engines from indexing this site and click Save Changes.
HTTP Authentication (Password protection)
Discouraging search engines with the WP Admin setting is not enough to guarantee that search engines will not index your site anyway. To really be sure your site does not get index, we recommend activating HTTP Authentication (password protection).