Whether you are using a blog for commercial needs or as a way to share travel moments and opinions with friends and family, most people place their posts publicly. Google and other search engines drive more visitors to your site, which increases the popularity of your articles and might drive increased revenue from advertising. But sometimes you want to make your WordPress blog private. How do you do this? The answer depends on what type of privacy you want.
Whether you are using a blog for commercial needs or as a way to share travel moments and opinions with friends and family, most people place their posts publicly.
Google and other search engines drive more visitors to your site, which increases the popularity of your articles and might drive increased revenue from advertising.
But sometimes you want to make your WordPress blog private. How do you do this? The answer depends on what type of privacy you want.
When and who needs a private blog?
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| Photo credit: Google |
- Private WordPress blogs are useful for sharing family events, wedding photos, baby photos, and so on with friends and family.
- Private blogs can be used as your personal diary or journal.
- Team work on projects can collaborate on private blogs.
- Websites that are under construction and not ready for public viewing.
- The class website can be made private and can only be accessed by students who are already registered.
Make individual posts private
Sometimes you want to save most of the content on the website for visitors to see but there are individual posts, videos, podcasts, or photos that you want to make private.
There are many reasons why people decide to make an individual post private. Maybe you want to share baby photos only with a group of people among family or friends. Maybe you want to share photos and text and don't want your boss or the company to see them.
Maybe you are working on an idea for a company and are not ready to share it with the public. Maybe you are a teacher and want to share material only with students. Or you want to share some personal thoughts and you don't want everyone to discuss them.
If you are interested in making private posts, but not for the whole blog, follow these steps:
Make posts that have been published to be private
If you have written an article and it has been published, you cannot protect it from certain archives. But you can prevent people from accessing it in the future.
From your dashboard, select Posts and then click All Posts.
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| Photo credit: Google |
From there, you will see a list of all posts. For what you want to make private, click on Quick Edit.
From there, see the word Visibility and change the setting to private. You can choose to make the post visible only to you (as well as anyone who is an administrator or editor of your blog) or choose a password.
Write Private Posts
If you are writing a completely new post and want to make it private, look in the upper right corner of the screen. That is where you will see publishing options where Visibility is written. Select "private" and then specify whether you want to add a password.
Note: You don't need to add a password to make the post private. If the post is private but doesn't have a password, the search engine won't index it and only you and other editors or administrators on the blog can see it. Posts that are private and have a password can be seen by anyone who has the password.
Make an entire WordPress blog or site private
Many people choose to make the whole blog private for a variety of reasons. Either because you share personal information about your feelings, want to share photos by choosing groups of family members and friends, or just want a place to develop your mind privately, it will be very easy to make an entire blog private.
Note: If your blog was previously public, copy or blog snapshots are available at various archives. But after you make a blog private, search engines like Google no longer visit (or link to your site), and the general public can't see anything on your site. It will take a few minutes for the new privacy settings to function.
To make an entire private blog, follow these steps:
- Enter the blog dashboard
- Select Settings
- From there, select Privacy
- You will see options: Public, Hidden, and Private. If you choose "Hidden", the search engine will no longer create links to the site but anyone who has a blog address will be able to see everything. Choose Private to make your blog private.
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| Photo credit: Google |
After you select Private, only you (and blog administrator / editor) can view the site. If you want to share a site by selecting a list of people, follow these steps:
- Enter the blog dashboard
- Click on My Sites
- Click on People and then Add
- You can add people's email or their WordPress user name. Add information of the person you want to invite to enter the site.
- Every person you invite to the blog will accept the role.
The role of each person will determine what they can do or see on the blog. Assuming you have made your blog private, here are different choices for this role:
- Viewer. This person can see anything on the blog and leave comments.
- Administrator. This person can access, view and change anything on your blog. Every administrator you add can do almost everything, including deleting a blog, so choose a new administrator well.
- Editor. This person can see the blog, make comments, and edit all posts in the blog, including yours.
- Author Author can view blogs, make comments, and publish new content using their WordPress user name.
- Contributor. Same with author, contributors can view blogs, comment, and publish new content using their WordPress user name. The main difference is that contributors cannot upload media to the site or delete comments.
If you want to change someone's access to a blog, follow the steps above to enter the People section. Select the user you want to modify, and make changes to their status or delete it.
Thereby.
It doesn't matter whether you are hosting your own version of WordPress or using a free blog hosted by WordPress, all the options above are available to you. By clicking on one button, you can make any post or the entire blog private.
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