InstaWP Protect Site
Protect Site puts a username and password prompt in front of your whole site. Every visitor has to enter them before the site loads. You set it up from the InstaWP dashboard.
In this documentation, we will explore:
- Which plans include Protect Site
- How to turn on Protect Site
- Keeping a site private on Starter plans and above
Which plans include Protect Site
| Plan | Protect Site |
|---|---|
| Sandbox | Available |
| Starter, Plus, Pro, Turbo, Elite | Not available |
| Legacy plans | Available |
Why it is missing on Starter plans and above: these plans include the CDN, so your pages are delivered from the CDN's cache instead of from your server. The password check runs on your server, so on a CDN plan the prompt can't be reliably enforced. To avoid a protection that only works some of the time, the option is hidden on these plans.
- If a site had Protect Site switched on before this change, it has been switched off.
- Staging sites are not served through the CDN, so Protect Site stays available on them.
How to turn on Protect Site
Step 1: Go to Sites and open your site.
Step 2: Click the three-dot menu at the top right of the site page. Under Access, select Protect Site.
Tip: You can also open the three-dot menu on the site's row on the Sites page. If Protect Site is not in either menu, your site is on a plan that includes the CDN. See Keeping a site private on Starter plans and above.
Step 3: Set a username and password and click Save.
Now the username and password are required every time someone opens your site.
Keeping a site private on Starter plans and above
There is no built-in password prompt for sites on CDN plans. These options can help, but none of them is a password prompt.
Hide the site from search engines
On the site's Administration → Tools page, turn Search Engine Visibility off. This asks search engines not to index the site. Anyone who has the link can still open it. See Search Engine Visibility.
Require visitors to log in
To keep visitors out, install a "private site" or "coming soon" plugin from the WordPress plugin directory that asks visitors to log in to WordPress before they can see the site. Once it is on, go to your site's CDN settings and click Purge CDN Cache, so copies of pages cached before the change stop being served. See How to Purge CDN cache.
About Maintenance Mode
Maintenance Mode on the Tools page is meant for short updates, not for keeping a site private. It shows a "briefly unavailable" page to everyone, including you, and WordPress removes that page automatically after about 10 minutes.
Need a password prompt?
A real username and password prompt is available on the Sandbox plan, which does not include the CDN, and on staging sites.