The Private setting makes your site visible only to you and logged-in users you approve. Everyone else will see a page to log in to their WordPress.com account and request access. This guide explains how to make your site private.
To set your website to private, and hide from visitors and search engines on the internet, follow these steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings → Reading.
- Scroll to the Site Visibility section.
- Select the “Private” option.
- Click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.
This setting will hide your site from all viewers. In addition, your subscribers will not receive any email notifications of your posts. To allow specific people to view your private site and add comments (if you’ve enabled them), you can invite them to become a Viewer.
The previous instructions will apply privacy mode to your entire site. If you instead want to make specific pages or posts private, without affecting your entire site, you can use the page or post visibility settings.
After your site is set to private, your visitors will see a “Private Site” page.
If they aren’t logged into their WordPress.com account, they can click the “Log in to WordPress.com” link to log in and request access:
If a visitor is already logged in, they can click the “request access” link to request access to your private site:
The site owner will receive a notification that the visitor wants to view the site, and they can approve or decline the request.
If you’d like to add people to a private site, invite them to become a user of your site. All users added to a private site must have a WordPress.com account. Logging into a WordPress.com account ensures that only those people you’ve authorized can view your site.
On plugin-enabled sites, setting the site to private disables some features to make your site entirely private from external sources, which may make image thumbnails and some theme and plugin functionality appear broken.
The following Jetpack features are disabled when a plugin-enabled site is Private:
- Post Automatically to Social Media
- Sharing Buttons
- Google Analytics
- Sitemaps
- WordAds
- Verification Tools
- Site Accelerator (CDN)
- Enhanced Distribution
- JSON API
When your website is set to private, you may experience issues with images displaying in Media and plugins not working. If you experience either of these issues, try the following options to keep your site private while using those required modules:
- Coming Soon Mode: You can set your site to Coming Soon mode to make sure that all features work and the images load as expected.
- Maintenance Mode plugin: Various maintenance mode plugins will allow you to customize the landing page of your site to your liking while you are building it. To use them, you can set your site to Public and install and set up a maintenance plugin.
When a plugin-enabled site is set to Private mode, photo thumbnails may appear as gray boxes in your Media Library. Additionally, images on your site may not appear or appear as gray boxes.
Set your site to Coming Soon or Public to resolve the issue.
Some plugins and themes rely on sending and receiving information to and from external resources. Private mode disables the JSON API, which stops communication to and from external resources. Switch the Privacy Settings to Coming Soon or Public to avoid this.
For a private site’s subscribers to receive email newsletters for new posts, they must also be added as a user (with at least the subscriber role) on the site. This is a security precaution to prevent unwanted visitors from viewing the content of your private site.
