You may want to keep some of your pages private or keep your website under wraps whilst it’s still being developed. Installing a plugin can restrict access to your content, but actually, WordPress has built-in settings that allow you to keep individual pages private.
This article takes an in-depth look at WordPress’ built-in options for setting content visibility and search engine visibility.
Content visibility
Page or content visibility allows you to control who can see your pages and posts. WordPress has 3 built-in visibility options: Public, Private and Password protected. You can find these options under the Publish section at the top right of the Edit screen.
Here’s what the three options mean:
- Public Visibility – Public is the default visibility of every page and post, and it means anyone can see public content as soon as it is published. In other words, your public pages will be found in search results. When it comes to restricting content, the other two options are a better choice.
- Private visibility – Private pages are only accessible to administrators or editors. For example, you can make your pages and posts private if you don’t want to show your work in progress. You may also need to create private pages to organize your uploaded files and images.
- Password protected visibility – Password protected, as the name suggests, protects a page or post with a password. Only people who have the correct password can access the content. This visibility option is ideal if you want to make your additional content accessible to a specific group of people.
While there is no built-in option to make the entire website private, installing a plugin proves useful to keep your WordPress website hidden. Our Password Protect WordPress Pro plugin is the most effective option to change website visibility and make your entire website private.
Visibility for search engines
Search engine visibility dictates whether search engines can crawl and index the content on your WordPress website. This means that you can stop specific pages from being displayed in Google and other search engines’ results pages, or even prevent your whole website from being indexed.
And there are definitely cases where you want to hide your pages or posts from search engines. One reason is to prevent the public from accessing your content.
To exclude your pages from search results:
1. Change the built-in settings options
This is an easy way to change the visibility of a page in the search engines.
When you change the visibility of a WordPress page’s content on your website, it also affects its visibility in the search engines. If you protect a page with a password or make it private, this page will no longer be displayed in search engines (unless you want it to be).
Despite the possibility of blocking indexing by search engines, this built-in function still has some disadvantages. If you select the “Password protect” option, you will have to give a password to anyone who wants to access the content. To allow people to access your private pages, you need to manage and define roles in your WordPress.
2. Install the Yoast SEO plugin
With plugins like Yoast SEO, you can easily adjust the visibility of your WordPress pages by following these steps:
- Go to the Advanced Settings section
- Select No for the option Allow search engines to display this post in search results
- Select No for the option Should search engines follow links in this post?
Once you have done this, a code snippet will be added to the header of your page. As a result, search engines will not be able to crawl and index this page.
3. Edit robots.txt files
Editing robots.txt files is another way to exclude your pages from being displayed in search results. This method requires some knowledge of robots.txt.
Enter the following code in your robots.txt files:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /your-post-or-page-url
The “User-agent” line is used to specify which search engines (e.g. Google or Bing) should be prevented from indexing. The use of an “*” means that we want to exclude all search engines. The “Disallow” line is used to specify the URL of the post that you want to hide.
Although most crawlers follow the instructions of the robots.txt files, others might not. As a result, some random pages of your website might be indexed.
What about changing the visibility of the entire WordPress website?
If you want to consider hiding your WordPress website from search engines, there are two great options. First is the use the WordPress search engine visibility option. To find this, go to Settings > Reading.
Then, activate the option “Block search engines from indexing this website” under the Search engine visibility option.
What this does is forces WordPress to change the robots.txt file of your website and add the following lines to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This is similar to the Robots.txt edit we made earlier, but instead of just targeting one page, it targets the entire website.
Please note that if you prevent search engines from indexing your website, your overall website and page rank will be severely impacted.
An Alternative: Install the WordPress Password Protection plugin
With our Password Protect WordPress plugin, you can protect your website content from Google and other search engines with just a few clicks. This is a good solution if you’re not a techie.
Another common question is whether file uploads are also protected with WordPress built-in visibility options. In short: they’re not. In fact, people can still access and download your images or videos if they find the direct URLs.
PDA Gold plugin provides an effective solution for protecting your WordPress uploaded files. It can also be integrated with the Password Protect WordPress plugin to block the direct URLs access to all of the media files including images, videos, or PDFs.
Conclusion
To summarize, there are several ways to change the visibility of your WordPress website; by setting the built-in options, editing the robots.txt files, or installing plugins. Depending on your scenario, they can all prove useful in certain cases.
