---
title: "Keep projects private by default with project visibility"
description: "Projects on Netlify can now start private. You can build, deploy, and preview as usual, but nothing is publicly accessible until you decide to make it public."
source: "https://www.netlify.com/changelog/2026-07-28-start-with-private-project-urls/"
last_updated: "2026-08-01T19:10:32.000Z"
---
Teams on a [Free, Personal, or Pro plan](https://docs.netlify.com/manage/accounts-and-billing/billing/billing-for-credit-based-plans/credit-based-pricing-plans/) now have project visibility settings to ensure that all of your project stay private until you decide to make them public.

More people are shipping prototypes, internal tools, early client work, and projects built with agents. A deploy is often a work in progress, not a publication. Netlify now reflects that distinction.

Project visibility settings allow you to:

-   quickly ensure your project stays internal for your Netlify team until you’re ready to launch more publicly.
-   ensure that your project stays private for you and your Netlify team.
-   choose defaults that keep internal-only projects private, such as for internal apps and tools or sensitive releases.

While project access affects who on your team can access a project from the Netlify dashboard, project visibility impacts who can view your project, both at the live URL and inside of Netlify, and requires Netlify login credentials if a project is set to private.

## Starting defaults

Starting today, all new Netlify teams on a [Free, Personal, or Pro plan](https://docs.netlify.com/manage/accounts-and-billing/billing/billing-for-credit-based-plans/credit-based-pricing-plans/) will have their projects set to private by default. This means that new Netlify teams will need to adjust the project visibility of each new site or app to decide when to make them publicly available.

If you have an existing [Free, Personal, or Pro plan](https://docs.netlify.com/manage/accounts-and-billing/billing/billing-for-credit-based-plans/credit-based-pricing-plans/) (all credit-based plans), then your starting project visibility settings are set differently to keep the previous default behavior before project visibility settings launched.

This means all your project URLs stay publicly available unless you’ve set up other authentication with code or Netlify’s password protection options.

## Change your project visibility

To change your project’s visibility, you can set a team default for all new and existing projects at: [Team settings > General > Visitor access > Default project visibility](https://app.netlify.com/teams/~/settings/general#default-project-visibility)

To change only one project’s visibility settings: [Project configuration > General > Visitor access > Project visibility](https://app.netlify.com/projects/~/configuration/general/#project-visibility)

## Availability

Project visibility settings are only available for Credit-based [Free, Personal, or Pro plans](https://docs.netlify.com/manage/accounts-and-billing/billing/billing-for-credit-based-plans/credit-based-pricing-plans/).

If you have a Legacy pricing plan, an Enterprise plan, an Open Source plan, you will not find project visibility settings. In this case though, you can still use [password protection](https://docs.netlify.com/manage/security/secure-access-to-sites/password-protection/), [Team login protection (for Enterprise only)](https://docs.netlify.com/manage/security/secure-access-to-sites/password-protection/#protect-your-sites-with-netlify-team-login) or configure [authentication with code](https://docs.netlify.com/manage/security/secure-access-to-sites/overview/#require-password-or-login-credentials).

## Learn more

Learn more about [setting up and managing project visibility](https://docs.netlify.com/manage/security/secure-access-to-sites/project-visibility/) in our docs.