How to make a WordPress site private? This question will come to your mind when you do not want everyone to visit your site. It is not everyone’s aim to keep their website public and get a good number of visitors. If your goal is to have a private website, the good news is you can create it with WordPress.
Today I am going to share the way to make a private website in WordPress.
Reasons to make your WordPress site private
1. Your site is under maintenance
When you are not finished designing your site, you will not be happy if people will see your broken site. In this case, it is wise to keep your site private until it is completely ready for the public.
2. Protect personal information
If you want to keep your personal information somewhere safe, you can make your site private. Same way, if you have a family blog that consists of family events with wedding photos, baby images and other personal information. You will like to keep your personal information protected from unknown people online.
3. Keep confidential data Safe
Maybe you want to use the website as a secure platform for your team members to work together. This is great to work in a secured space that only authorized people can access.
4. Monetize your website
You can offer services such as lessons to only your subscribers. Thus you can offer membership opportunities and earn money from the visitors.
These are the common reasons for making WordPress sites private but there can be many more reasons as well.
How to make a WordPress site private
There are some different ways that you can use to make your WordPress site private based on your personal requirements. Maybe you want to private a single blog post, page or the entire site. So it is up to you how much privacy you want. Here I am showing 3 different ways that you can adopt.
Make a single page or blog post private
Making a single page or blog post private is much easier than making your whole site private. Here, you need to follow these simple steps to hide a single blog post on your WordPress site.
You need to open the page or blog post that you want to make private. Go to the visibility setting and click on the password protected. Set a strong password for the page and click on the “Update” button. Now the page or blog post will not visible if someone searches the URL of the page or blog post instead, they will see a password page.
Hide your site from search engines
This method prevents the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex) from indexing your site. That means your site will not be available on search engines. As a result, your site will be ranked or even shown for any search result. But that will not prevent visitors from finding your site when they search your site address directly. That means people can still visit your site if they know your site address. Although it is not an exact solution how to make a WordPress site private, it reduces the chance of getting visitors from search engines.
Go to Settings> Reading, then mark the search engine visibility option to discourage search engines from indexing this site. Finally, click on the “Save Changes” button.
Make your WordPress site private with a plugin
Maybe you have a live site for a while. Now you want to design or redevelop the site. You want to keep the visitors away during the under-construction period. Discouraging search engines do not give you a guarantee of total privacy.
On the other hand, you can install a plugin and put your site in a maintenance mode so that visitors can not see your site content except the maintenance page. Using a plugin can give you the ultimate solution and make your site completely private. Even those who know your site address can not see your content. Let me show you how to make a WordPress site private using a plugin.
There are a few plugins out there to use to make your site private. We are using the My Private Site plugin for this article.
Step-1: From the sidebar, go to “Plugins” and click on the “Add New” button.
Step-2: Now search the “My Private Site” plugin and click on the “Install Now” button.
Step-3: Now activate the plugin.
Step-4: Now, click on the “My Private Site” menu. On the next page, enable site privacy using the checkbox. Now click on “Save Privacy Status” to make your site private. There will still be some public pages if you use the free plugin. If you want to make your entire site private, you need to use the premium version of the plugin.
Thus, using the plugin, you will easily make your site private.
Conclusion
How to make a WordPress site private is a very popular question among users. After reading the article, we believe you will be able to make your site, single post or page private according to your need.
You may also read: How to Delete a WordPress Account
