Wondering to yourself ‘can you password protect a WordPress site?’
Not only can you assign a password to your WordPress website, posts, pages, and content, but it’s also incredibly easy to do.
In this guide, we’ll show you a few of the easiest methods out there for you to password protect your WordPress site (and why you might want to).
If you’d like to jump ahead, here are each of the methods in this post:
Why Password Protect Your WordPress Website?
We often get asked the question ‘should I password protect my website?’ Honestly, depending on the situation and type of business you have, there are a lot of great reasons to protect your WordPress site. Here are a few:
- If you want to make your entire WordPress site private to the public.
- To make money online by only allowing people who have paid you to view a page with things like courses or other content.
- If you’d like to restrict access to most people with the exception of those who enter the password.
- In order to run a giveaway and only let people access the form who have subscribed to your newsletter.
- Perhaps you’d like to keep things (like live changes) private while you are working on building your website or while it’s under maintenance.
- If you’re maintaining a website for your small businesses that you only want to be used for internal purposes.
- To password protect individual WooCommerce store products.
- If you want to keep a special WordPress post or page secret for only exclusive people.
So now you’ve seen some of the big reasons you would want to password protect your website. Maybe you’re now interested in doing this on your site. Luckily, with WordPress, it’s super easy to do.
So let’s go ahead and look at the top ways people password-protect their sites.
How to Password Protect WordPress
Ready to password protect your WordPress site? Check out these easy methods below.
1. Adjust WordPress Visibility Settings
You can set up a password on an individual post or page right in the settings of the WordPress editor by navigating to Status & visibility » Post Visibility.
This is the quickest method to password protect parts of your WordPress site, but it has its limitations and doesn’t always look very professional.
This way displays a (not great-looking) Protected title on the title of the page or post when set up.
But if that doesn’t bother you and you’re looking to password protect a specific page or post, the Status & visibility dropdown in WordPress lets you do just that.
You can do this for any specific WordPress pages and posts. For instance, if you’re just getting off the ground with a membership site, you may want to password-protect the area that holds your courses.
If you use the same password on multiple pages or posts, once someone unlocks one page or post they’ll also unlock all of the ones that use that same password. This could be a great way to unleash multiple pieces of content to people at once. If you don’t want that, make sure to enter a new, unique password for each page.
Features of This Method:
- Works for specific pages and posts.
- Can be used on WooCommerce product pages.
- Is completely free.
- A smart way to password protect specific products in your WooCommerce store, even if you’re using a WooCommerce plugin.
- Super simple to use right in the WordPress editor.
- Is available in the new block editor as well as the classic editor.
- Can be used to unlock multiple pieces of content (with the same password).
- Allows for you to use more than one password across your site per page/post.
2. Use Form Locker
If you need to password protect your WordPress forms, using the Form Locker feature within the WPForms plugin is the best way to go.
The Form Locker addon lets you easily add a password to your forms so that only specific people can access them. This could be especially helpful for all kinds of privacy-related situations.
For example, you could create a password for your support form and only allow paying customers to access it.
With this awesome access controls tool, you can also restrict your forms to be available only for logged-in users of your WordPress site. Among other things, this would be another helpful way for businesses that want to restrict support to paid customers only.
But there are a lot of other things you can do with this tool as well. You can use it for these types of support forms of course, and also for WordPress contests where you only give the password in your newsletter, and even more.
Features of This Method:
- Password protects any of your forms with your preferred password.
- Schedule a date and time when you want your form to be accessible.
- Make it so only each person can fill out your form one time.
- Choose if you want to limit the total number of entries (great for giveaways).
- Restrict your forms so that they are only available to members (members-only site).
3. Install SeedProd
SeedProd is a landing page builder plugin that can not only build beautiful websites but can also be used to hide your pages and site from the world.
The SeedProd plugin is awesome because it lets you password protect your WordPress site while under development. That way, only the people you provide that password to you can view the new site that’s being worked on.
SeedProd Pro has an Access Controls feature that lets you do a lot of great things to help protect your WordPress website from the public, and show it to who you want to. You can do all kinds of things like excluding or including specific pages, allowing specific IP addresses, and more:
Plus, there are tons of other things you can with SeedProd since it’s one of the best WordPress plugins out there.
Features of This Method:
- Super easy to use with a drag and drop visual builder, plus has the option to undo, redo, save, and reuse.
- Looks and acts like a landing page.
- Access Control lets you give users a bypass URL or alternatively limit access by role or IP address.
- Protect your site’s SEO while also restricting content.
- Create Thank You pages, custom 404 pages, webinar registration pages, video landing pages, and more.
- Works with any WordPress theme.
- Really fast and won’t slow down your website because it’s lightweight.
4. Password Protected Plugin
Wondering how do I password protect my entire website? A very simple and free way to do this is with the WordPress plugin called Password Protected. You can simply install the plugin and access some great tools.
It’s important to note this though: This plugin doesn’t protect images or uploaded files. Meaning, if someone accesses the URL that your file is uploaded to, they’ll be able to see it.
If that isn’t an issue for you and you don’t need your entire website to be hidden, then this plugin could be a good option for you to password protect WordPress.
Features of This Method:
- Use a single password to protect nearly your entire website.
- Gives you the option to allow WordPress administrators access to the site without needing to enter the password.
- Offers the choice to allow people to access feeds.
- Sets a cookie to allow access to a site, so may not work well with caching plugins or hosts with caching services.
- Allow specific IP addresses so that users visiting your site from the IP address won’t even have to enter a password to access your website.
So there you have it. Some great ideas on how to password protect your WordPress site or a WordPress page.
After You’ve Password Protected Your Website…
Hopefully, this post helped you find the best ways for you to password protect your WordPress website. Next up, you might also be interested in reading our post on how to build a coming soon page in WordPress.
So what are you waiting for? Get started with WPForms Pro and access the Form Locker addon today.
And if this tutorial helped you out, we’d love it if you followed us on Facebook and Twitter for more WordPress guides and tips.