AdSense rejected: "Site under construction" — how to fix it
Almost nobody who gets this rejection has a site that is literally under construction. It means the reviewer landed on something unfinished — Lorem ipsum left in a widget, a broken menu, a theme's demo content, or a page that errored — and concluded the site was not ready, whatever the rest of it looks like.
How to fix it
- Open your site in a private window. Log out completely. Half of these rejections are things the owner cannot see because a logged-in session, a cached page or a caching plugin hides them.
- Delete every trace of the theme demo. "Hello world", "Sample Page", the theme author's placeholder posts, stock images with a watermark, and any widget still reading "Lorem ipsum". A reviewer who finds one assumes there are more.
- Click every link in the navigation. Menus that point at unpublished drafts or deleted categories produce 404s in exactly the place a reviewer clicks first.
- Remove empty sections and coming-soon pages. An empty category, a blank "Contact" page, or a section labelled "Coming soon" reads as an unfinished site more strongly than a missing section would.
- Check the site on a phone. A layout that collapses on mobile looks broken rather than unstyled, and most reviews will include a mobile view.
The name of this rejection is misleading
Very few sites that receive it are unfinished. What happened is that a reviewer
encountered something that reads as unfinished, and stopped there. The rest of
the site may be excellent; it did not get that far.
This makes it, oddly, good news. Unlike "low value content", which is a judgement
you have to argue with, this one is a list of concrete defects. Find them, remove
them, re-apply.
View the site the way the reviewer does
The single most useful step is to open the site in a private window while
completely logged out. A large share of these rejections are invisible to the
owner:
- A caching plugin serving a different page to logged-out visitors
- A maintenance-mode plugin still enabled for everyone but administrators
- A membership plugin gating content the reviewer therefore cannot read
- Personalised elements that render only for a logged-in session
If the site behaves differently for you than for a stranger, the stranger's
version is the one under review.
The usual defects, in the order they are found
Theme demo content. "Hello world", "Sample Page", the theme author's
placeholder posts, a slider still showing the demo photographs. Reviewers find
these immediately because they appear on the homepage and in the archive.
Broken navigation. A menu built before the content existed, still pointing at
categories that were renamed or posts that stayed in draft. Every one of those is
a 404 in the place a reviewer clicks first.
Empty containers. A category with no posts. A "Reviews" section with one
placeholder. A footer widget area with the default text. Each says the site is
mid-build.
Placeholder copy. Lorem ipsum in a widget, "Your tagline here" in the header,
"Add your description" in the about page. These survive surprisingly often
because they sit in theme settings rather than in posts.
Check what an outside request sees
Your browser is not a reliable witness — it has your cache, your cookies and your
session. Fetch the homepage as a stranger would and read the raw response. If the
HTML that comes back contains a maintenance splash, a redirect to a holding page
or a login wall, that is what the reviewer received regardless of what you see.
The same applies to mobile. A layout that breaks on a narrow viewport does not
read as "needs styling"; it reads as broken, and most reviews include a mobile
view.
Why this one is worth fixing carefully
It is fast to fix and fast to re-apply for, which tempts publishers to rush it
and re-apply against a half-cleared site. Each rejection makes the next review
slower. Spend the extra hour finding all of it.
Frequently asked
- My site is finished. Why did AdSense say it is under construction?
- Because the reviewer saw something that reads as unfinished, not because they assessed your publishing schedule. The usual culprits are theme demo content, a broken menu item, an empty category page, or a plugin rendering a placeholder. Viewing the site logged out almost always surfaces it.
- Does a "coming soon" section cause this?
- It can, and it is not worth the risk. A section you intend to fill later should not exist yet — publish it when it has content. The same applies to navigation items pointing at pages that are still drafts.
- Could a caching or maintenance plugin cause this?
- Yes, and it is one of the harder versions to spot. A maintenance-mode plugin left enabled for logged-out visitors shows the reviewer a splash page while the owner sees a normal site. Check in a private window, and check what an outside tool sees rather than trusting your own browser.
- How quickly can I re-apply?
- As soon as the problems are genuinely gone. This is one of the fastest rejections to fix — it is usually a handful of concrete, verifiable items rather than a judgement about quality.
Check whether this is still blocking you
The free Monetific checker tests your site against this and every other mechanical requirement, and tells you what is still outstanding before you re-apply.
Run the free check