If you’ve ever wanted to control who can preview your site before it goes live, today is your lucky day. We are pleased to announce password protection for sites in development. Now you can require a visitor to supply a username and password to access your site, ensuring that only approved users can view your work in progress.
Password protection is available for sites both in production and in staging, and is as simple as checking a box. And when you’re ready to go live, remove protection with one click and you’re ready to launch.

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To learn more about how to enable password protection for your site, check out our knowledgebase article, Password Protecting Your WP Engine Site.

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There are 14 comments

  • Paul Wenzel on
    January 7, 2015 at 11:26 am

    Is this using HTTP authentication or WordPress-style prompt/cookie authentication?

    HTTP authentication would be useful for doing password-protected requests with things like cURL or automated testing tools.

    Reply
    • Matt on
      January 9, 2015 at 9:51 am

      Yes, it does use HTTP Authentication.

      Reply
  • Torre Kean on
    January 7, 2015 at 3:06 pm

    This is awesome!! Could this hypothetically be used for live website that you want to password protect for all visitors? Like a membership site?

    Reply
  • Toby on
    January 7, 2015 at 5:39 pm

    This is great! Nice work! Goodbye Maintenance Mode plugin! 🙂

    Reply
  • Kevin DMH on
    January 7, 2015 at 6:17 pm

    Excellent new feature! We were building this into our themes until they go live, but it was a hassle.

    We appreciate the way WP Engine pays attention to the way the community is using WordPress and proactively adding new features.

    Reply
  • Don Downs on
    January 7, 2015 at 10:38 pm

    Found this the other day and have been using it. I came on board with WPEngine as I was building this site – so having this to keep prying eyes of my site while under construction has been great. I like it much better than the “under construction page” I was using. It created such a hassle to get to and work on my real Home Page.

    This been great! Love it. Thanks for a great utility!

    Don

    Reply
  • Bryan on
    January 8, 2015 at 3:26 pm

    Convenient way to not having to include custom plugin. Unfortunately, doesn’t work on all sites. If you are using any framework like roots or have a plugin using relative urls you will probably run into issues with javascript and css not all loading.

    Alternative to this is adding a mu-plugin:

    Reply
  • Chad on
    January 8, 2015 at 7:39 pm

    Nice feature!

    Reply
  • Steve Wilkinson on
    January 8, 2015 at 10:28 pm

    This will be quite useful. Thanks much!

    Reply
  • Matt on
    January 9, 2015 at 9:52 am

    This is an excellent addition. The one thing we need now with it is the ability to set our own user/password for the authentication.

    Reply
  • Charles on
    January 9, 2015 at 11:23 am

    Sweet! Been waiting for password protected dev sites. We can stop editing craptastic htaccess files now! Yay!

    Reply
  • Erik on
    January 19, 2015 at 2:46 am

    Nice easily accessible feature… would like a reset/change password (create new random password) option though in case the password needed to be changed.

    Reply
  • Michael on
    January 30, 2015 at 12:40 am

    Great feature. Too bad we cannot set our own password though. I don’t like the complexity of the automated ones.

    Reply
  • Jonas Gold on
    June 9, 2015 at 3:05 am

    So, if I run a multisite and just want to password protect some of the sites….how do I do that? 🙂

    Reply