Your blog's address

Every blog gets an address the moment it is created: something.rankbench.site. It needs no DNS, no certificate and no waiting, and it works the second you go live.

It is a real address, not a preview. You can publish on it for a year and never connect a domain.

Choosing the name

Yours, if nobody has it. Letters, numbers and hyphens. A handful of names are held back because they are used for the hosting itself.

You can change it later on Domain, and when you do the old one redirects to the new one rather than going dark. That is the same promise the rest of the blog makes about addresses.

Going live

Until you press it, the blog answers nothing. Not a holding page: nothing. No reader can reach it and nothing can index it.

Going live is free, like the rest of the blog.

Two settings are worth checking before you do.

Hide the whole blog from search engines, on Settings, asks every search engine not to list any page. It is the right setting while you are writing and the wrong one afterwards, and it is the single most common reason a new blog never appears in a search result. The switch says as much.

Feeds and Search are both on by default. Feeds give readers RSS and Atom to subscribe to. Search gives the header a box and the blog a search page.

Pausing

Pausing takes the blog off the air deliberately. Every address answers with a 503 rather than a 404.

That distinction is the whole point. A 404 tells a search engine the page is gone and the rankings you built go with it. A 503 says the site is temporarily unavailable, which is true, and everything is waiting for you when you come back.

Nothing is deleted by a pause. Posts, pictures, authors, categories, domains and certificates all stay exactly as they are.

If a subscription lapses

Nothing happens to the blog. It is free, so it keeps serving on its Rankbench address and on your own domain, and you can keep writing and publishing in it.

What stops is the part that is Pro: the content calendar writing articles for you. Any code of your own you already added keeps running; changing it needs Pro again.

Two addresses at once

A blog can have its Rankbench address and your own domain at the same time, with one of them nominated as the real one. Everything canonical on the page points at the nominated one, and the other redirects to it, so search engines never see two copies of the same post.

That is what makes moving safe. Start on something.rankbench.site, connect blog.yourdomain.com when you are ready, and every post keeps its slug and picks up a redirect from the old address. See using your own domain.