How To Protect WordPress Post Page Content

Depending on your needs and online objectives, WordPress post, page content can be made inaccessible for public viewing.

There are several ways to prevent general site visitors and unauthorised users from accessing content on your site, or viewing sections of some of your WordPress posts pages content while giving access to the same content to others.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the built-in methods WordPress provides for protecting content on your site, as well as some other options and methods, involving WordPress plugins.

Please watch the video below, or complete the step-by-step tutorial to learn more about creating private and password-protected posts and pages using the WordPress built-in content protection methods …

How To Make Your Content Inaccessible For Public Viewing

There are a number of ways to protect content on your posts and pages from being easily accessed by anyone visiting your site, or unauthorized users.

Below are some of the more common reasons for protecting content on your site:

You want to provide information to users only after they have made a purchase on your site (e.g. Downloadable info products)
You want to provide information only to certain groups of people (e.g. Wholesale price lists and trade catalogues, confidential forms and business documents, updated member’s lists or databases, private company data, etc…)
You want to start a private membership site where members must register first before they can view or access your content
You want to offer discount coupons or “how to” information that can only be unlocked or revealed to users with a special password, or after performing a specific action (e.g. Sharing your post with others on social networks)
And so on …

Built-in WordPress Content Protection Method #1 – Password-Protecting Posts And Pages

WordPress lets you easily create a password-protected post or page, so that only those people with the correct password can view the content on that specific post or page.

To password-protect a post or page, log into your WordPress site, then find the post or page you want to password-protect …

If you have already created the post or page, then you don’t need to open your file. Just click on the Quick Edit link below the post or page you want to password-protect …

This will expand the in-line editor …

Enter a password into the Password field …

Click Update when finished to save your changes …

To see how your password-protected post will look to your site visitors, click on Preview…

As you can see, the entire post is now password-protected. Only users with access to the password can unlock the post or page and view your content …

As you can see from the above screenshot, WordPress displays the word “Protected” to site visitors before the title of your password-protected Post or Page, and a password form asking users to enter the password to access the content.

How To Protect WordPress Post Page Content

Additionally, WordPress will not display your Post Excerpt when the content is password-protected …

You can also password-protect a post or page while you are working on the content by clicking on Publish > Visibility > Edit …

Select Password protected, enter your password in the Password: field and click OK…

Click Update to save your changes …

Your post or page is now password-protected …

Additional Information On Password-Protected Posts

Only an Administrator, Editor, or the post’s Author can change a post’s password or visibility setting. To access the “Visibility: Edit” link, go to your Posts or Pages screen, find the Post or Page you want to edit and click on the Quick Edit link. (Tip: Use this method if you ever forget a Post or Page password).
When Password-protecting many Posts or Pages, WordPress will store your password in a browser cookie so your site visitors don’t have to re-enter passwords if they visit the same page a number of times. Also, if you add the same password to multiple Posts, the user will only have to enter the password once to access every post, except if two or more posts use different passwords. Because WordPress only tracks one password at a time, if two or more posts use different passwords, users will have to re-enter the password if they visit a Post that requires a different password to access the content, and then they try to revisit the previous post.
You can change the password of your password-protected posts or pages as often as you need to. This can be useful in situations where you don’t want people who have had previous access to the content to access the content again. For example, if you offer new discount coupons each week, if you reward a new subscriber every now and then with a different product or download, etc …

How To Protect WordPress Post Page Content

Built-In WordPress Content Protection Method #2 – Make A Post Or Page Private

By default, when you make a post or page private, only logged-in users assigned the role of Administrator or Editor can view the private post or page on your site. When anyone else tries to access a post or page marked private, they will not be able to see it …

To make a WordPress Post or Page private, log into your WordPress site, go to your Posts (or Pages) section, find the Post (or Page) that you want to make private and click on the Quick Edit link …

This will expand the in-line editor …

Tick the Private checkbox …

Remember to click Update to save your changes …

If you are adding a new post or editing your post content, you can make the post private by clicking on Publish > Visibility > Edit then selecting Private and clicking OK…

Remember to click Update to save your changes when finished…

Your Post or Page is now private and can only be found by your logged-in Administrators and Editors …

Additional Ways To Protect Your Content

Password-protecting a Post or Page uses the WordPress password-protect feature offers some level of content protection, but it also has the following limitations:

1) All users share the same password

If you want each user to have his or her own password, then you will need to set up your site so that only registered users are allowed to view your content. This can be easily done using plugins that turn your WordPress site into a “membership” site.

WordPress “Membership” plugins are covered in a separate tutorial on How To Start A Membership Site Using WordPress.

2) All content on the Post or Page is protected.

When you password-protect content on WordPress using the native WordPress function, everything on your Post or Page is protected.

If you want to make some or most of the content on a Page or Post visible to everyone, while protecting part of it (i.e. The “juicy’ bit containing the information that only those with access can view!), then there are plugins that you can install on your WordPress site that allow you to provide “partial-content” protection to site visitors.

One plugin that lets you protect selected content which includes text, images, video and links is the Password Protect Selected Content plugin …

The Password Protect plugin can also be used to hide information inside other short codes, such as video embeds and file download links.

You can also partially protect content with plugins like WP Share To Unlock (Free plugin) that will “unlock” the content when someone performs a social sharing action (like clicking a Facebook “like” button, or sharing your page or video on Twitter, for example. Some plugins that unlock content can even help you build your subscriber list!) …

Another great content locking plugin that combines partial content protection with viral social media sharing capabilities is Viral Outbreak PRO – a versatile content locking premium WordPress plugin designed to help drive viral traffic to your WordPress site quickly and easily …

Viral Outbreak PRO allows you to offer something of value for free to your visitors (e.g. a valuable tip, special report, a discount voucher, etc …) on your site. Your special content is hidden or “locked away” in your post and can only be unlocked when your visitor performs a desired action to get the free content such as liking you on Facebook, or posting a tweet about your site on Twitter or 1 on Google . This action then helps to drive free traffic to your site … virally!

How To Protect WordPress Post Page Content

Protecting Your Content From Being Copied Or Stolen

Note: It’s practically impossible to prevent people from stealing content that is visible on your site (e.g. Text and images). The web was designed to share content online. The plugins presented below will simply prevent those who really can’t be bothered to dig deeper into the source code of your pages.

In addition to locking and hiding content, there are also plugins that try to prevent other people from copying / stealing your content.

For example, the Free WordPress plugin called Blog Content Protector stops people from selecting and copying text on your site or right-clicking on your images and saving them to their own hard drives by disabling the right-clicking and text selection function on your site.

Protecting Your Images

If you are worried about people stealing your images, there are a few options you can look at implementing.

One option is to add a “watermark” to your images using a Free WordPress plugin like Watermark Reloaded. Adding a watermark lets people know who the original owner or creator of the image is, and trace the image back to the originating domain.

Another preventative measure you can take to stop people clicking on your images and saving them to their computer is to use the No Right Click Images plugin …

Content Protection – Additional Tips And Information

Tip #1 – If, for whatever reason, you find yourself changing the visibility settings of most of your Posts or Pages to “private”, then install and activate the Private Post By Default WordPress Plugin.

This plugin automatically sets all the Posts and Pages you create to “private” by default. All you have to do then, is change the visibility settings of any Posts or Pages that you want to make visible on your site back to “Public”.

Tip #2 – As explained earlier in this tutorial, by default private posts are only visible to users on your site that have been assigned the role of Administrators or Editors.

What if you want to allow users who are not Administrators or Editors to view private Posts or Pages on your site?

For example, let’s say that you run a business consulting firm and you want your consultants to be able to distribute reports privately to clients through your site, or your children’s school wants to post class assignments privately to students online through their school blog.

One option would be to make everyone who needs to have access to private Posts or Pages on your site into an “Editor”. This is not a very good option, however, as they would then be able to modify your content.

Fortunately, there is an excellent free WordPress plugin called User Role Editor that lets you change the capabilities of any standard WordPress user role (to learn more about user roles, see this tutorial: WordPress User Management) …

With the User Role Editor plugin installed, you can assign the same capabilities for reading private posts and pages that “Editors” have, to users assigned the role of a “Subscriber” …

This would now let all registered users on your site assigned the role of “Subscriber” to access and view your private posts and pages without being able to modify the content.

There are a number of other options for protecting your content online in addition to what has been presented in this tutorial, but these options typically involve messing with code on your site or server.

If content protection is an issue for you and you require a solution that is not covered in this tutorial, then please contact us and we’ll advise you about other possible options.

WordPress is huge and can sometimes be overwhelming about where to start. As you move on to the next Page, you will have a clearer picture of where to start and progress to building a professional WordPress Site.