What Is WordPress Private Pages and Posts?

Have you heard about WordPress private pages or posts? These are pages or posts not visible to the public eye or with content not seen by website visitors even when they access the URL. Does this sound interesting? Let us discuss more about this in the following sections.

Everything You Need to Know About WordPress Private Posts or Pages

Why and When Would You Use WordPress Private Posts or Pages?

When pages or posts are private, the content is only visible to the website’s authorized users who can log in to the Dashboard page. Why would you make your website’s content private when you created your site for the public to view?

There are things you do using WordPress that should not be published anyway, such as the following:

• You want to share content with a selected group of family members or friends.
• You want to share personal content with people but not your employer or certain businesses.
• You are working on some business ideas that you are not ready to show to the public yet.
• Your profession requires sharing content to a selected group.
• You have private thoughts that you do not want the entire online community to know.

What Are the Different WordPress User Roles?

To help you better understand who can only access your private page or post, let us briefly discuss the roles of the WordPress users.

• Administrator – The administrator is the site owner, and this role can change the settings of the Dashboard, install plugins, add, and remove users, and publish, edit, delete, and add posts.
• Editor – The editor can change posts in the Dashboard but cannot change the site’s settings or install plugins.
• Subscriber – The subscriber can log in to the website and must be logged in to see the content.
• Author – The author can only change the posts they have written. They cannot modify other posts from other authors on the website.
• Contributor – They can write and edit their posts but cannot modify them once published on the website. They cannot add photos to their own posts, too.

When your posts or pages are private, WordPress limits visibility to the editor and administrator only.

How to Create a WordPress Private Page or Post

Now that you know the importance of private pages and posts, let us show you how to configure this feature on your website.

Changing Visibility to Private

From your Dashboard menu, go to Posts. Select Add New if you want to start a new post or All Posts if you want to edit an existing post.

Hover over to the post you want to modify and click Edit.

On the right side of the edit page, you will see the Publish section. Click Edit for Visibility.

You will see three options. Select Private and click OK and then Update for an existing post or Publish for a new post to save the changes.

Check your post on your website. You will see “private” on the post if you are a user who can log in to the website’s Dashboard

If you are a visitor of the post, who cannot access the website’s Dashboard, you will see a page-loading error.

For the private page, the steps are the same. Go to Pages and select All Pages if you want to edit an existing page or Add New if you want to add a new page

Click Edit on the page you want to modify. On the right side of the edit page, you will see the same section as with the posts.

Modify the visibility of the page to private and click OK and then Update or Publish. If you visit your website, you will see the page as private as well.

Changing Visibility to Password Protected

You can also use the other option, which is Password protected, for both posts and pages. The steps to configure are the same. Just select Password protected and type the password.

If you check the post, you will see “protected.”

For pages, it looks the same for this option as well. You will see it as protected, and viewers will need to enter a password to access the page.

The cons for this option, however, is that those who have your password might share it with others who are unauthorized, which increases your privacy risk.

Conclusion

WordPress private pages or posts are beneficial to hide confidential and sensitive information to the public. Make sure that your administrators and editors are the trusted people in your business to avoid privacy risk.

Configure the settings of your posts or pages now, hide confidentiality from the public, and share it only to a group of reliable people!