Without any technical knowledge, password-protecting a page in WordPress is simple with the right tools. This guide would demonstrate how to password-protect a WordPress page and why it is important for your website right below.
What is Password-Protecting a Page in WordPress?
Password-protecting a WordPress page is usually adopted to prevent public access. You might want to hide certain pages of your site that are still under construction or restrict access to your login page to only site editors or clients. No matter what the reason, a password-protected WordPress page enables you to keep content hidden from users without a password. This is beneficial for pages with a restricted audience or members-only pages.
Steps to Password-Protect a WordPress Page
There are different methods to password-protect your page in WordPress. You can either go with built-in page settings in WordPress or use a WordPress plugin. Check out more details about it right below.
Using Built-in Page Settings in WordPress
- Sign into WordPress as the admin.
- Click Posts under Dashboard and then hit Add New.
- Write your content.
- Click Edit next to Visibility and under Publish. Options for post visibility will appear.
- Click the tab Password protected.
- Give a strong password in the Password text box.
- Select OK and then hit Publish. Visitors must now enter the right password when they visit the page’s URL to see its content.
Using WordPress Plugin
Various WordPress plugins are available in the market that is free of cost yet reliable and accessible. After installation and activation of the plugin, you have to go to Settings and then Password Protected. To enable password protection, check the Password Protected Status box. Then, type your preferred password in the New Password box.
Certain plugins also give you the option to whitelist certain kinds of IP addresses and users/requests. If you want, you can even configure these. When you activate it, a simplified version of the WordPress login page will appear for anyone attempting to access your site, asking them to enter a password.
Advantages of Enabling Password Protection
Major advantages of enabling password protection to your website comprise:
- Sales on the right website
- Page rank or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Not accessible to hackers
Sales on the Right Website
A search engine would begin to index the page and show the user’s search results if a search engine bot can find and crawl a secondary website. When desktop users notice the website address, they might realize they are in the wrong place. However, not everyone is aware of the various web environments and would mistakenly believe that the website they are using right now is the “Production” or live website.
On the staging site, the user would make a purchase and anticipate receiving their ordered goods. This can be avoided in the future if you enable password protection on your secondary website.
Page Rank & SEO
One of the huge advantages of enabling password protection is the privacy obtained from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These companies offer robots that scour the internet and index all of the data. This is excellent news for any production website that uses an e-commerce solution. Your page rank can be harmed by duplicate content and out-of-date information, though.
A staging or development site is almost always a replica of the production site. When password protection is enabled, neither human nor automated site visitors is permitted to access it without first entering a username and password. It thereby eliminates the risk of harming the page rank and SEO of your live website with a secondary site.
Not Accessible to Hackers
A security flaw in a new version of a WordPress theme or plugin has been found often and needs to be fixed. The secondary environment is now vulnerable to an attack if you installed the advanced and latest version of the plugin or theme. As the website is a front-facing public entity and the code is still in place, enabling password protection would prevent any hacking attempts on the website’s front end.
Conclusion
Passwords continue to be the most popular type of digital security as they provide a low bar to entry. Password-protection-enabled WordPress page or site allows access with the right password or else not. Enabling password protection to your website adds another layer of security.