How to Hide Pages in WordPress

From time to time, you may find yourself needing to hide a page from visitors to your site so that only specific people can see a page.  You might want to do this to provide a special bonus for your subscribers or you might have a video that you want to show a client but no-one else.

A question that I get asked is how do you do it. It is quite simple really, all you do is setup a WordPress “Page” and hang it off your blog. Many themes should have a “no sidebar” template for a page so you can use the full real estate of the page. This is good as it provides less distractions for the viewer by removing the sidebars.

The next steps are as follows:

• Enable no follow, no index and no archive
• Hide it from the wordpress menu
• Ensure it does not appear in your site map

The next step is to hide the page from the rest of the world besides the people who have the link.  Because I use Thesis, what I do is enable the “nofollow, noindex, noarchive” checkbox. If I am using a different them I install the meta robots plugin or one of the all-in-one SEO plugins such as the platinum SEO plugin and check mark the “no follow, no index, no archive” box.  Now the search engines will ignore this page and it won’t show up in searches.

The next is to hide it from other wordpress pages/posts/menus and even the search feature. You can use the “WP Hide Post” plugin. It gives you a nice little menu when creating pages or posts that allows you to completely hide ythem from search and menus.

The final step is to ensure your newly created page does not appear in your site map. I’ve been caught like this before.  Use a plugin such as the Dagon Design Sitemap plugin where you can control what pages / posts you don’t want to appear in your site map.

The end result is that I make a single page, check off the appropriate options on the page, and it’s invisible to everyone unless you know the exact URL which I then send to my customers or prospects.

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