How To Password Protect Your Website
If you want to keep some of your website hidden or protected from the general public, there are a number of different ways to password protect your website.
You can keep some (or even all) of your website private by putting a password protection system in place. The level of security will depend on the method that you choose. How strong (or weak) your passwords are will be another factor in the security of your web pages. Your passwords should be a minimum of 8 characters long and a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers and - for extra strength - other characters.
Start by looking in your web hosting control panel. If your host uses Cpanel (which is the most popular control panel) then all you have to do is select the password protection option and follow the instructions. This is an easy and fast way. All you need to do is select the folder you want to password protect, type in a user name and password and click the “save” button.
The only snag with this method is that you’ll need to either do this for every single user of your site or use a common user name and password that is issued to everyone. You can work around this by changing the password regularly but there is still the potential for people to share the log-in details.
If the thought of logging into a control panel fills you with dread or your control panel stubbornly refuses to allow you to password protect part of your site, there are other methods you can use. There is a simple software program that will do everything for you at an affordable price. Check with your website host to see whether of not you're hosted on a Unix or Linux "platform". If you are, you can restrict access to your pages using your htaccess file. There are plenty of tutorials on the web if you want to go down this route.
If your reason for password protecting your website is that you’re running a membership site, there are a number of software programs out there to help. One of the best supported of these is called Amember - you can get more details from this link.
