WordPress lets users share their posts web surfers and people without restrictions. However, in some cases, when people want to keep the full blog or specific posts private, they need to add some settings in the blog privacy, and the post visibility.
People like you and me do that to share family photos, personal details, and even, to work on the site design while it’s under construction. No matter what the reason is, I’ll show you how to make a WordPress blog private, and share content with selected people. And even, you can protect your posts or images with a password.
The first thing you need to do is to tell search engines like Google and Bing that you don’t want your blog to be indexed right now. That’s a good option when you’re building your blog. I recommend doing that to avoid getting your username and some other details that can be indexed by Google, and appears for hackers.
To no index your WordPress blog, login into the dashboard, and then, click on “Settings”. Next, click on “Reading”, finally, check the box that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”, as the below screenshot.
Now, that you’ve told search engines to stop indexing your posts, and blog in general, you need to protect a specific post, for example, with a password. So, later you can send the password to a friend or a family member to use it to access that post. On your post editor page, click on “Visibility”.
Then, select the “password protect” options to make the post private, and can only be seen by members who can enter the password.
To make things protected better and redirect all the non logged in users to a specific login URL, you can install a free plugin called private content. You can use this plugin to define a public page that people can see, or even, to create a custom login page, where, all visitors should be redirected to login in order to see the blog.
Thus, you can work privately without sharing your posts with people and search engines. And even if someone wants to see your posts by accessing the site URL directly, he needs to enter the password to see any content. This is your fully private WordPress blog.
The private blog function is not only used to share family and friends photos and content but also, to allow teachers to send their lessons to students directly from the blog and even learn online and communicate.
Please remember to secure your blog and especially, the log page. If you change the default URL, you will be able to avoid 99% of the spam, and people who want to attack blogs like yours.
The default WordPress login page URL is known and everyone can use it after the domain name to see your login page and how it looks. So, if you change that URL completely and make it custom, no one can see the login page, and that’s the top security and protection that you need.
Of course, you have to keep your login details safe without sharing them using not encrypted connections. Google mail is an encrypted connection that you can use to sand details, but, make sure that you delete them later for better security.
