This post was last updated on 6/30/2018

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There could be times when you want to publish a piece of content that’s not available for the general public, but only for your eyes or for the users that have access and proper permission (Editors and Administrators) on your website.

Fortunately, WordPress has a built-in feature for this too, which allows you to make your posts and pages private.

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The WordPress post or page you make private won’t appear anywhere in the article lists.

Even if a normal user or a visitor will somehow guess or accidentally stumble upon the private article’s URL, he/she still wouldn’t be able to see the content!

Click here if you want to jump straight to the video tutorial.

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How to make a post or page private

This is very easy and straightforward. All you have to do is to create a new page or post, or edit an existing one, then go to Visibility, click on Edit, and set it to Private. Then click OK and the Update or Publish button.

Edit Visibility in WordPress

How to Make WordPress Posts and Pages Private

Told you it was very easy! Let’s see how it looks when you or anyone with appropriate permission views the post.

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Private Post in WordPress

As you can see, the word “Private:” appears before the post or page title.

Now let’s see what happens if I search for that link as a simple visitor, without being logged in to WordPress.

Page not found

As you can see, the content was not displayed even if I inserted the correct URL for that post.

You can always edit your private post or page and make it Public if you wish.

How to make your entire WordPress site private

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t have a built-in feature that allows you to make your entire website private, but, luckily, there are some plugins that can do that. Here are a few of them:

Making your site completely private is also the best way to stop search engines from crawling your website if you wish or need to.

Video tutorial

 

That’s a wrap

Hope you enjoyed the post and found it useful and comprehensive!

If you have any questions or thoughts that you want to share with us, please drop a comment or even contact us!