How to Password Protect Your Entire WordPress Site:-Similar to WordPress membership plugins, adding password protection to WordPress site don’t need user login or signup which looks useful in many cases. You can restrict access to certain private WordPress posts and pages with simple password. When setting up private website for internal discussion & communication or while the site is under construction, you need to protect your complete WordPress site. Through this process anyone with the password can access it without register or signup.
There are so many plugins available in the WordPress plugin directory to password protect the whole website. Here in this post, we have discussed the top 3 password protect WordPress plugins:
- Password Protected:- This plugin will protect your entire site with single password . All you just need to first turning on the setting option and then enter the password. Your homepage & rest of the pages will be blocked against public.
The plugin allows administrator and logged-in users to access whole website without enter a password. Also there is a option to keep RSS feeds public even if your entire website is protected.
“Password Protected” is no. 1 plugin on WordPress repository with lots of 5 star reviews. On the other side, the plugin doesn’t provide extra features regarding password protection
Pros:
- Straightforward and easy to use
- Auto-access to administrators and logged-in users.
Cons:-
- Comes with outdated UI.
- Protect WordPress content with limited options and no other features.
How to Password Protect Your Entire WordPress Site
- Hide My Site:-
This plugin offers more advanced features to protect website against public or search engines. While you can enable side-wide protection by checkbox settings. Also it allows users to stay logged-in for certain period of time. User can re-access the site without password until pre-set time passes by.
Additionally you can set a hint for password reminding visitors of the password. It should be a clue of maximum 53 characters that only authorized users will know. If you’re afraid of unwanted users can guess password based on the hint, you can leave it empty.
Your site could be set to accessible to users who log in as admin or coming from specific IP addresses. Hide my site have a unique feature of Brute Force protection that helps prevent hackers from guessing password using “Brute Force” method.
Instead of these advanced features, still there are rooms for improvement in terms of UI.
Pros:-
- Provide many login themes
- Customize notification messages
- Allow access from specific IP address
Cons:-
- UI could be improved
- Doesn’t protect attachments
- Password Protect WordPress:- The plugin provides another solution to password protect the entire site. All your website content involving posts, pages, custom post types except media files are password protected. For security purpose password is encrypted. It’s not visible to anyone including admins. The cons of using this is you have to reset the password in case you forget it.
While securing your website, you can exclude one or more specific pages.
Instead of displaying login page directly, You may want to show a coming soon or landing page to let the visitors know that it is a private site.
Unlike duration feature of Hide My Site, password protect WordPress frees users from having to enter same password again until cookie expire. You can change expiration time from setting page.
Apart from site-wide protection, the Password protect WordPress have many other features. The plugin allows to set multiple password per post & page. What’s more, each & every user role have a different password one for editors and one for subscribers.
Caching plugins & server side caching cause conflicts with password protection features. This plugin resolves that with minor configuration.
Pros:-
- Able to exclude specific pages from site-wide protection.
- Integrate with prevent direct access gold to protect file uploads.
- Provide other password protected features
- Comes with modern UI and easy to use.
Cons:-
- No options to customize login page
- Relatively new for most of users.