How to Make Your WordPress Blog Completely Private (4 Ways)

Do you want to make your WordPress blog completely private? With over 60 million WordPress sites active today, both personal and business users have an increasing need to make their content private and secure.

According to WordPress stats, over 409 million people view more than 20 billion WordPress pages each month. With this massive reach, controlling access to your content is crucial.

In this step-by-step guide, we will show you four different methods to make your WordPress blog completely private:

1. Create a Coming Soon Page with SeedProd
2. Make a Private Members-Only Website with MemberPress
3. Make Your WordPress Blog Completely Private with My Private Site Plugin
4. Make Individual Blog Posts Completely Private with WordPress Settings

Why Make Your WordPress Blog Completely Private?

Usually, when you publish a new blog post in WordPress, you’ll want to share it publicly for the entire world to see.

However, there are many reasons you may want to limit access and make your WordPress site or specific content private, including:

• A blog that‘s being built or undergoing maintenance that is not fully ready for public viewing. Making it private allows you to develop your site behind the scenes.
• A family blog for sharing family events, wedding photos, baby pictures, and more privately with limited friends and family.
• A private blog for your personal diary, journal or internal notes.
• A space for teams to collaborate on projects outside of public view. For example, wikis and internal sites.
• A classroom website with lessons and notes that‘s only available to registered students.

According to a survey, over 58% of WordPress users have security concerns when using the platform. With the right technique, you can keep your site private and ease these worries.

Now let‘s dive into the four methods for making your WordPress site completely private:

Method 1: Create a Coming Soon Page with SeedProd

The easiest way to make your entire WordPress site private is by using the SeedProd plugin. SeedProd is the most popular WordPress coming soon and maintenance mode plugin, used by over 1.6 million websites.

It lets you easily create coming soon and maintenance mode pages with a simple drag and drop builder. This is the fastest way to make your whole WordPress blog private while you work on it behind the scenes.

SeedProd is equipped with over 150 different templates you can use to create custom pages like coming soon pages, maintenance mode pages, 404 pages, landing pages, and even entire custom WordPress themes without writing any code.

Benefits:

• Super fast and simple to setup coming soon or maintenance mode pages
• Beautiful templates that are customizable
• Build your email list while site is private
• Prevents search engine indexing during development
• Create unlimited landing pages and coming soon variants

Downsides:

• Limited customization compared to building from scratch
• Need to pay for some premium templates and features

If you want to create a coming soon or maintenance mode page to make your whole site private during development or construction, see our guide on how to create coming soon and maintenance mode pages in WordPress with SeedProd.

Method 2: Make a Private Members-Only Website with MemberPress

Another excellent way to make an entirely private WordPress blog is by creating a membership site that‘s only accessible to paid members.

The best way to create a membership site is with the MemberPress plugin. MemberPress powers over 30,000 membership sites and has helped creators earn over $1 billion in sales.

It lets you easily create paid membership levels, deliver members-only content, and manage access with WordPress roles and capabilities. This makes your whole site private, only viewable by members.

MemberPress integrates with all the top page builders and lets you drip feed content to members over time. You can create private podcasts, courses, communities and more.

Benefits:

• Complete control over access with memberships
• Automatic recurring payments
• Integrates with page builders and other plugins
• Deliver members-only content over time
• Monetize exclusive or premium content

Downsides:

• Need to manually hide non-member content
• Registration can be complex for some users

For complete details on turning your WordPress site into a paid membership site, see our ultimate guide on creating a WordPress membership site with MemberPress.

Method 3: Make Your WordPress Blog Completely Private with My Private Site Plugin

Another simple way to make your whole WordPress site private is by using the My Private Site plugin. This plugin makes it easy to hide your entire blog with just a few clicks.

My Private Site is a great option for personal and family blogs that only want to share content with a small group of users. It can also be used when your website is temporarily under construction.

First, install and activate the My Private Site plugin. See our beginner‘s guide on how to properly install a WordPress plugin for details.

Upon activation, go to My Private Site > Site Privacy in your WordPress dashboard to configure the plugin settings.

Check the ‘Enable login privacy‘ box, so the plugin will make your whole site private. Then click ‘Save Privacy Status‘.

With this enabled, anyone visiting your site will see a login screen and need credentials to proceed. You control who can access the site.

You can then choose where users are redirected after logging in successfully. Pick an option that best fits your site structure.

In the Membership tab, choose whether visitors can self-register for the site, or if you need to manually approve all new users.

That‘s all it takes to make your full WordPress site private with My Private Site. It‘s fast and easy but lacks some of the flexibility of other methods.

Benefits:

• Super fast and easy to make site completely private
• Lets you control member registration
• Useful for personal sites and internal use cases

Downsides:

• Very limited customization options
• No ability to make just some content public
• Very simple so lacks some features

Method 4: Make Individual Blog Posts Completely Private with WordPress Settings

If you only need to make a few individual posts or pages private, you can use the built-in WordPress privacy settings.

Simply edit the post or page you want to make private. In the right-hand sidebar, click the Visibility dropdown menu currently set to Public.

This opens up options to make the content private or password protected.

Choose ‘Private‘ if you only want logged-in users to see it. Pick ‘Password Protected‘ if you want to grant access to anyone with a specific password.

If using a password, choose a secure password following best practices like using special characters, numbers, upper and lowercase letters.

Once you publish or update, the content will only be visible to users with the proper role or password.

Benefits:

• Selectively make just some content private
• Easy to control access permissions
• Can use same technique for pages, posts, attachments

Downsides:

• Time consuming to set individual permissions
• Only basic privacy options available
• Users might share protected password

This technique is useful for situations where you just want to limit access to certain pages or blog posts, rather than your entire site.

Conclusion

Controlling access to your WordPress site is crucial for many users. We hope this guide gave you several options to make your WordPress blog completely private.

The best technique depends on your specific goals. For whole site privacy, a coming soon page or membership site is best. To make just some content private, use built-in WordPress settings.

Be thoughtful about your approach to ensure search engines and visitors only see what you want them to. With the right strategy, you can keep your WordPress site completely under wraps until you are ready to share it with the world.