Frontend Gatekeeper

Frontend Gatekeeper hides the public frontend of your WordPress site unless visitors arrive with a configured URL parameter and value. It is useful for staging sites, soft launches, client previews, and pre-release content where you want to share a single shareable link instead of issuing individual user accounts.

Logged-in users always see the site normally, so editors and administrators are never blocked.

Features

• Hide the entire public frontend with a single toggle.
• Configurable parameter name and secret value, set per site.
• Custom blocked message shown to unauthorized visitors (served with a 404 status).
• Same-site link propagation: WordPress-generated links, menus, and block content automatically carry the access parameter forward, so visitors stay authorized while browsing.
• Footer-script fallback that adds the parameter to links and forms rendered outside normal WordPress filters.
• Gutenberg and block-theme aware through the render_block filter and WP_HTML_Tag_Processor when available.
• Multisite-aware URL scoping for subdomain and subdirectory networks: access on /site-a/ will not leak the token to /site-b/.
• Logged-in users, wp-admin, REST API, AJAX, cron, and wp-login.php are always allowed through.

Typical use cases

• Sharing a staging or pre-launch site with clients and stakeholders.
• Gating a soft launch behind a single link instead of provisioning accounts.
• Hiding draft or campaign content until you are ready to publish.