A password gate puts your whole site behind a login. Use it while a site is being built, for a preview you only want a client to see, or for an internal tool. Visitors get a browser sign-in prompt; search engines can't get past it.
Before you start
- The site must be live.
- The gate is on the site's Settings tab, the account's owner, administrators and developers see (developers see the sections they may change). See team roles.
Make a site private
- Open Sites → your site → Settings → Visibility.
- On the Private site (password gate) row, press Make my site private.
We create a random password for you. The row now shows Private and the login:
- user:
gate - password: the one shown on the row
The gate is up within a minute. Share the user and password with the people who should see the site. Anyone with access to the Settings tab can read the password there.
Make it public again
On the same row, press Make my site public. The gate comes down within a minute.
Change the password
There is no field for choosing a password. Make the site public, then private again: each time you turn the gate on, you get a new random password and the old one stops working.
Note: On a WordPress site, the Visibility band also has an Admin gate (extra login on /wp-admin/): an extra login in front of the WordPress admin and login page only, while the rest of the site stays public. The two are separate switches.