WordPress robots.txt mistakes before launch

Part of the series: WordPress Pre-Launch Technical Checks A WordPress site can look finished and still carry one of the most annoying launch problems: a robots.txt file that sends the wrong signals. This is one of those technical details that often survives staging, migration, or last-minute changes. Everything looks fine on the surface, the homepage loads, the design is approved, the client is happy, and then... crawlability is not what you thought it was. Before launching a WordPress site, robots.txt deserves a quick review. What robots.txt actually does robots.txt is a plain text file placed at the root of a site. Its purpose is to give crawl instructions to bots, especially around which paths should or should not be crawled. It is not a magic privacy wall, and it does not guarantee deindexing by itself. But it does influence crawl behavior, which makes it part of any solid pre-launch technical review. Why this matters before launch During development, it is common to protect stagin