Password protect a free site
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I am trying to create a members only site. The public site will link to it and I want to password protect. It is however a free template twenty fourteen. I’ve seen lots of information out their but it look like it’s all for premium sites and to be honest I’m very lost.
Currently I believe that you can only password protect posts not the entire site with a free template?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there, site Privacy is entirely independent of the theme you choose. If you choose to make your entire site Private, this will allow you to invite people as Viewers, who will need to log in to WordPressdotcom to view your Private site.
You can set your site Privacy follow this guideline: https://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/privacy-settings/
Here is how you invite people to view your Private site:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/adding-users/#invite-people-to-view-your-private-blogLet us know if you need more help with that.
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I don’t want that as people will have to be WordPress members. I just want to password protect the site.
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Hi again, of course you can password protect each post and page on a Publicly visible WordPressdotcom site, but passwords can be shared-you don’t really have control over who has passwords.
If you want the entire site to be limited to a certain group of users/members and have the ability to control who is and who is not allowed to see your WordPressdotcom site, then making the site Private is really the only method here and the only way to control access to your Private site is by having each user/member sign up and be signed in to their WordPressdotcom account to do so. Hope that is clearer.
Another option is to host your own install of the standalone WP software and run a membership plugin on it. If that is closer to what you want to achieve, you can get more information about the standalone WP software over at https://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page and at https://wordpress.org/support/ If you don’t have a username on the ORG forums, you can register one on that page.
Running a standalone install of the WP software on 3rd party hosting does take more technical ability. More about the differences between WP and WordPressdotcom here: https://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/
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I really don’t want people to have to use a password for every page within the members only group.
And again private isn’t an option as people don’t have WordPress accounts.
I genuinely though that this would be a standard thing. This means I may have to completely rethink using WordPress as my blog site. This is incredibly disappointing
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I understand your dilemma. You can create two sites; one for Public view and a second Private site available only to members that you invite, and who need to sign in with their WordPressdotcom account to access it.
That is the only solution that I’m aware of currently available to sites hosted on WordPressdotcom.
In the end, even self-hosted WP membership sites require their members to log in in order to access member only content. The only difference is that if the site is located here on WordPressdotcom, they need to have a WordPressdotcom account rather than your site’s membership account.
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As I’ve said this isn’t an option because my readers aren’t members of WordPress. And they really shouldn’t have to be either to just view content. I think you really need to look at this because it’s very basic.
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Hi again, I just realized I didn’t include the links in my above reply on how to password protect posts and pages. https://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/page-visibility/
https://en.support.wordpress.com/post-visibility/I’ve also tagged this for Staff attention to take note of your concern.
Best wishes.
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Hi there,
We intentionally created the Private Site option rather than password-protected sites as a password given out to multiple people is not secure. Requiring every person to have to log in with a unique username/email and password to view a site is secure. It is highly unlikely that we’ll add password protected sites to our current options.
And while it’s possible on self-hosted WordPress sites to install a plugin to create a members-only area inside an existing site where each member has their own password, adding something like that to WordPress.com would be technically complex, and would most likely be a paid feature if we were ever to include it.
If that type of functionality is important to your site, then you might want to look at the self-hosted WordPress.org option instead. As I mentioned above, on a self-hosted site you can achieve what you want by installing any of a number of membership plugins on your site.
You can find information on self-hosting here:
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