Sometimes there are some options that we often ignore or never care to study in detail. The Publish section (or module) that appears in the top right side in Posts and Pages is one such option that allows users to password protect or make a post or page private in WordPress. In this post, we will study in detail about the Visibility area of the Publish section.
First things first; you may think that why should a post be password protected? A post or page can be password protected when you don’t want to share the content/article with the world. Such a post can be shared with certain people or you may just want to keep a memory of your personal life.
Notice the small Visibility section of your Publishing options. From here, click on the Edit button.
This Edit button will open more options and below you can find full explanation of each of them:
- Public: This is the default option. This option is used for publishing posts that are visible to everyone.
- Password protected: Select this option if you want to password protect a particular post. This option will offer a text field where you can enter the password that you want to set. Once the password is set, you can then give it to those who you want to share the post with.
- Private: Private posts are only visible to blog Editors and Administrators. Such posts won’t be visible in Reader, feeds, or in any search.
If you set a post as password protected, then the visitor will need to enter a password on your website in the text field provided and then click on the Submit button (Refer below screenshot).
Once you are done with these options, hit the Publish or Update button.
Note that if you password protect majority of your posts and if in future you want to change them to Public, then you will need to edit each post at a time and there’s no way to bulk edit multiple posts to switch from Password Protected to Public.