Restricting content access to certain parts of your website is one of the most popular ways of monetizing your content, so here are a number of plugins to help you out in creating a private section on your blog or WordPress site.
Restrict Content Pro
Restrict Content Pro is a complete membership and premium content manager plugin for WordPress. Create an unlimited number of memberships levels, including free, trial and premium. Manage members and their subscriptions, track payments, offer discounts with a complete discount code system, and provide premium, members-only content to your subscribers.
With multiple methods of restricting content, you will find it quite simple to restrict entire posts / pages or just portions of them. Want to show content to premium users only? No problem. Want to show content to non-registered users only (such as a signup form)? No problem. Want to show content to non-registered users and non-premium users? This is simple too.
MemberPress
MemberPress is a WordPress membership plugin that makes it easy to charge your users for access to content and digital products such as software and e-books.
It will give you the ability to confidently create, manage and analyse membership subscriptions and digital products. In addition to these powerful abilities, MemberPress will allow you to grant and revoke access to posts, pages, categories, tags, feeds, communities and digital files based on what products your users have purchased or subscribed to.
Paid Member Subscriptions
Paid Member Subscriptions is an easy to setup, yet comprehensive membership plugin that allows you to create subscription plans, accept payments and restrict content based on membership level or logged in status.
The content restriction feature can be set globally, using a paid Global Content Restriction add-on, or individually for each post, page or custom post type.
Besides restricting the standard content types, you can also restrict WooCommerce products (viewing and/or purchasing) as well as the Shop page.
If you have a bbPress powered forum, Paid Member Subscriptions lets you restrict both forums and individual topics to non-members.
It comes with multiple types of restrictions, like restriction using a message, restriction using a redirect or loading a template.
Profile Builder
Profile Builder is an all in one user registration and profile plugin, which also offers the ability to restrict content based on user role and logged in status.
The plugin is focused on allowing users to create front-end registration and profile forms with different types of custom fields, but the feature pack extends to customizing emails, setting up redirects, as well as creating advanced user listings (member directories).
It includes a role editor module which makes it really simple to create, edit, delete and duplicate user roles as well as add and remove capabilities.
The content restriction feature extend also to WooCommerce products or bbPress forums.
You also have a restriction shortcode available in case you only need to restrict parts of your content.
PrivateContent
PrivateContent is a simple and fast solution to power up your WordPress website by adding a multilevel login, private areas, user private pages and users management features. It’s easy to use and doesn’t require any scripting knowledge.
Among its features you will find the ability to completely lock down your entire site (including menus) with one click, a form skin builder to blend the plugin into your site’s design, as well as a powerful public API in case you need to extend restrictions or add capabilities to create a custom system that works for you.
WP Customer Area
WP Customer Area is a modular all-in-one solution to manage private content with WordPress. Files, pages, conversations, tasks, etc: sharing private content with one or multiple users is the main feature provided by this plugin.
WP Customer Area guarantees a member-only area accessible only to authenticated users. The content shared in that space is fully secure and will never be indexed by search engines. The base plugin allows to privately share pages and files for free, while the add-ons provide even more: conversations, projects, task lists and much more.
Have you used any of these plugins to restrict content? Or are there other plugins that you prefer to use? Let us know more in the comments below.
23 Responses
Thanks for sharing. I think private content plugins should also be added to this list. They can protect and restrict access to private content. I’ve searched around and come up with this list of private site plugins which is worth your consideration.
Very helpful. Needed this for a clients back end of a member only website.
Hi,
nice overview!
Is there a way to restrict pages with a login, without having a user account? We have a website where we want all the customers to login with the same account. We provide the login and password. However, if we give them a WordPress subscriber account, they are able to change the password. We do not want this. Are there any solutions for this?
Best regards,
Lode
Looking to restrict access to a specific landing/offer page after an individual visitor (email address or ip address) has opted in and viewed the page once (opened it and then closed it). Any suggestions?
Thank you very much. It is very useful.
Great article, thanks. Is there any plugin that provides single-user access controls to file downloads (e.g. device or IP address restricted) to avoid too-easy sharing of access amongst peers?
hi. i’m searching a plugin to protect by password or redirect to login page for pages I want to protect.
the password, like a wifi connection, I want to set up for everybody by myself and I don’t want to delegate the user login to each user’s profile
any suggestion?
Nice collection of plugins, thanks! Also worth mentioning might be “Restrict Anonymous Access” if you just want to hide parts of content from guests with a shortcode: https://wordpress.org/plugins/restrict-anonymous-access/
I would add PaidMembershipPro (PMP) which is free and easy to use.
And I would remove S2Member. I have used it in the past and it was horribly confusing to configure. It took hours/days to get it to work. Even the mention of S2 sends me into traumatic shivers. ugh.
Thank you!
Good list of useful plugins. I also wrote an article on better understanding how to achieve content restriction for simple use case ( restricting the access to a certain category on your blog for instance ). You can check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks and keep up the good work :).
https://www.bynicolas.com/code/wordpress-content-access-restriction/
Really helpful, well-structured article for getting a good overview about restricting content access plugins. You can try User Activity Log Pro WordPress plugin to monitor and keep track of all the activities occurs on the admin side. goo.gl/2mioQR
If anyone is looking for a free plugin for content restriction, we just released a new plugin called Content Control: https://wordpress.org/plugins/content-control/
The plugin allows for whole pages/posts to be restricted, inline content restriction using shortcodes and also visibility controls for widgets.
Thanks 🙂
Do you know of an existing site that is using these plugins effectively? I’d like to see better examples than the ones teh vendor provides.
This list is missing Copyfight: https://wordpress.org/plugins/copyfight/
Penny is your site using copyfight? I’d love to see it in action. Their website doesn’t have a lot of documentation, and their “copyfight any page” feature doesn’t work, but it seems to have just the right features for me.
Hi,
In this list, you could also include our plugin: Customer Area
https://customer-area.marvinlabs.com
It is free to setup a basic private area and you can also buy add-ons to get more complex features.
The plugin now has its own website: https://wp-customerarea.com
How could a new member who payed his membership get a personal page where he could maybe threw a form give or change content like text and images on his bakery for example, and thus present his business. All members should the have an image thumbnail on the landing page and a little headline and search button. Is this possible togehter with the plugins described or further addons to it ? Thanks
Oh sorry ! You have already written something about them → https://bit.ly/15PZs2r
To try:
– https://wp-member.com/
– https://www.s2member.com/
Thank you for these suggestions for restricting content. I have been using another plugin, in order be able to specify which users can see which content with a lot of control and have been happy with it.
It is called User Access Manager and can be seen here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/user-access-manager/
Thanks for sharing your experience Michael, that is another good (and free) plugin.