Privacy Options within WP Dashboard

WordPress is a platform intended to allow you to share your thoughts and ideas freely and easily with the world. However, there are options to publish to a more limited audience.

Limiting viewership

The first way is to limit who can find your website. That is done by keeping search engines, like Google, from seeing (known as indexing) your site.

To do this, we’ll start at the Dashboard. Navigate to Settings > Reading.

Normally the box next to Search Engine Visibility is unchecked. If you decide to check the box, it will “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” This option depends on the search engine to honor your “request” and some search engines will simply ignore it. Obviously this is not a sure-fire way of keeping your blog private.

Limiting posting permissions

You also have options to control who see individual posts on your site. These options are more reliable but require you to set them on each post. When editing a post you can either mark it as Private, which will only let people who are logged in to your site view that post, or you can choose the Password protected button and then type in the password you wish to use. Setting posts "Password protected" allows you to share a post with anyone you give the password to without requiring them to have an account on your site first. Click on OK after changing this setting. Then be sure you click the Update button to save your post with the new settings.

 

For additional privacy options add the Password Protected plugin (or for Multisite use the More Privacy Options plugin).