How to Build Your Download Pages Inside WordPress

I don’t know about you but I hate building product download pages. Why? Because I am a WordPress fan and I just can’t be bothered to boot up Nvu in order to build a download page. Call me lazy but it’s just a pain in the you know what!

I got to thinking about this yesterday and wondered whether there was a way to build my download pages within my WordPress site. I think the key to a download page is that it needs to be hidden. I don’t want anyone finding it by accident – and that means people and Google. I achieve this usually by giving the page a strange filename and adding noindex instructions to it to tell the robots to go away.

After a little searching I found a couple of plugins that worked a treat. Here’s how I did it:

1. Hide your page from the search engines – Download a copy of the Meta Robots plugin from Yoast. This lets you do all kinds of funky stuff hiding various pages so you don’t lose page rank and even editing your.htaccess file from within your WP dashboard! For this ‘trick’ though it allows you to add a combination of noindex and nofollow instructions to individual posts and pages from within the editor.
2. Hide your page from your site visitors – Download a copy of WP Hide Post. I also don’t want my normal site visitors stumbling across my download pages. It’s pretty simple to hide a page from the page navigation but I also need to ensure it doesn’t appear by accident in site search results or archive pages. This great plugin allows you to set various levels of ‘hiding’.
3. Amend the sitemap – Final step is to amend the sitemap.xml plugin settings – simply scroll down to the correct section and tell it to exclude this page from the sitemap. (To get the page number you need go to the page dashboard and hover over the page title – the page name appears in the bottom left bar of the browser).

That’s it! The theme I use allows me to select full width pages with no side bar so I’ve used that and build my first in-site hidden download page. It’s quick, it’s easy, I don’t have to remember which analytics code or whatever to include in the footer to track it – and best of all – I can build all of my site pages from within WP!