Among the diverse plugin ecosystem that WordPress provides, WooCommerce is evaluated as the best assistance for WordPress users to run online stores. It’s been supporting thousands of businesses to extend their capabilities and broaden brands’ awareness. Unfortunately, online businesses are highly at risk since online piracy and security still challenges users on finding the best solution to reduce the losing revenue to the minimum. That’s why several questions concerning WooCommerce content restrictions are raised.
Understand what you guys are looking for, in this article, we will explain in more detail the importance of restricting access to your WooCommerce products. In addition, you will find the three most effective ways to stop unauthorized users from approaching your products or categories.
- Why You Should Limit Access to Your WooCommerce store
- 3 Effective Ways For WooCommerce Content Restriction
Let’s get right to it.
Why You Should Limit Access to Your WooCommerce Store
When you lock certain products on your online store, it requires users to create an account or purchase the access code in order to view or buy them. And that’s how you monetize your premium content, such as well-conducted research, special cooking recipes, ebooks, music.
If your store has multitudinous products classified differently based on prices, value, types, or user roles, users’ ability to access them will vary also. It’s a big loophole that you need to seal as soon as possible. Even users logged in to your site, it doesn’t mean they’re able to see all the products. Similarly, users with a standard account should be welcomed to view the content of premium pages. Hence, it would be better if you can restrict certain users to access protected products.
Last but not least, better safe than sorry. In this digital age, every transaction and activity can occur online without barriers. That somewhat facilitates hackers to have a favorable environment to commit their crimes. It opens the door for users or even hackers to come and take your properties freely. That doesn’t sound like what an active or alive business should do at all. So before it’s too late, let’s find ways to prevent harmful users from stealing your high-quality products.
3 Effective Ways for WooCommerce Content Restriction
With countless choices in the WordPress plugin repository, you might be confused and couldn’t figure out which plugins work for your situation. In fact, WooCommerce does provide a feature to help users protect their downloadable products. But it seems not strong enough to fully shield your online stores.
1. WooCommerce default settings
In case the majority of your products are intangible, then WooCommerce can partly help you protect them. In the WooCommerce downloadable product settings, it gives you some essential solutions to stop users from downloading your products.
Once monetizing your content, you need to limit users’ access to those products. They might need to become members or log in to their account in order to see the premium content or products. WooCommerce has a “downloads require login” checkbox for you to tick on whether you want to identify the access or not.
Unfortunately, if your store is selling both tangible and intangible products, there’s no way to protect the physical items. On top of that, allowing logged-in users to be able to access products doesn’t seem effective enough to keep the unhealthy ones at bay.
This is when you should look for a better solution. In this situation, robust WooCommerce integrations can enhance the security of your online store.
2. Password Protect WordPress Pro – WooCommerce Integration
Password Protect WordPress (PPWP) Pro is popular among WordPress users thanks to its power helping password protect posts, pages, custom post types, and WooCommerce products as well as categories.
Normally, your Products page doesn’t have any option to protect items in it. With the PPWP – WooCommerce integration, you can pick which content or products will be protected.
When enabling the “password protect” function, you’ll see all the password information such as password status, usage limit, and password expiry in the pop-up window.
To change this data, simply switch to the New Password tab where you will find more options to strengthen the password. Creating unlimited, strong, memorable passwords for certain products would never be easier. You can also assign specific users roles the permission to access products and make purchases.
The plugin works as a protection layer that avoids any unauthorized approaches. Without a provided correct password or site’s account, visitors only see the password form no more, no less.
More advanced, with the partial content protection features, you can even take advantage of that to entice new visitors with the demo or introduction of your products.
Then, password protect the products’ links or the monetized content to encourage them to buy access to those products.
3. Access Levels
Having the ability to protect every product on your website is a fascinating feature. But imagine your stores to scale up to thousands or even millions of products. Protecting every single item would definitely be painful.
Understanding users’ demand, PPWP Pro extends its functionality with Access Levels extension to allow you to password protect the entire post categories. Once you password protect certain categories, all the contained products will automatically be protected as well. If you create new posts for products belonging to the protected categories, later on, those posts will inherit the protection as well.
Providing more powerful features, this extension separates security based on different levels. You just need to assign lower password levels for standard subscribers to restrict them to see more valuable content. Premium members or VIP customers can receive a higher password level to reach all the products you offer on your website.
This extension is wonderful for larger-size online stores. It makes the protection and restriction more convenient and faster than you can ask for.
Don’t Make Your Valuable Content Open To Everyone!
Not every product on your website should be accessed freely. Either for profit or security reasons, you should restrict content in your WooCommerce store to specific user roles with certain protection types.
The default settings of WooCommerce help you ask users to log in in order to download products but they will be limited to intangible products only. Meanwhile, the complexity of information hacking scares us even worse with sophisticated stealing methods. That’s why we suggest other advanced plugins including Password Protect WordPress Pro – WooCommerce Integration, and Access Levels. Not only do they help you password protect content, but also restrict access based on user roles and password levels.
Let us know what you think about WooCommerce content restriction in the comment section below.
