Ever wondered about a situation where the wrong users are seeing content on your website that they shouldn’t? Maybe paying members are sharing premium resources with non-members. Or perhaps sensitive company documents are accessible to someone who shouldn’t have access to them.
Worse yet, what if someone with the wrong permissions accidentally edits or deletes important content?
That’s where restricting content based on user role comes in. It’s a great way to ensure that your site’s content is accessed only by the intended users.
By controlling who sees what, you can keep your site organized and secure. In this post, we’ll look at how to restrict WordPress content by role.
But before that, let’s understand a few situations in which you would want to restrict your content by user role.
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Why Restrict Content by User Role
Your website attracts different types of visitors. These can be customers, members, employees, and even casual browsers. But not all of them need access to every piece of content on your site. That’s where limiting your users based on user role can act like a smart move.
Depending on the content you have on your website, you may want to restrict access to your content by user role for the following reasons.
- Protect Premium Content – If you offer paid memberships, online courses, or exclusive resources, like digital content, you don’t want unauthorized users accessing them for free. Role-based restrictions keep your content behind the right paywalls.
- Protect Sensitive Information – If you have internal documents, company reports, and client data on your website, you don’t want them to be publicly available. Restricting such content by role ensures that only authorized users can access confidential materials.
- Prevent Unauthorized Changes – If you have a multi-author website, having role-based permissions can help prevent accidental (or intentional) edits that could break pages, delete content, or cause security vulnerabilities.
WordPress by default, allows you to restrict access to your content based on user roles. Let’s look at how to restrict content by user role in WordPress.
Restricting Access to Content by User Role in Default WordPress
As the site owner, WordPress automatically assigns you the role of an Administrator or Admin. This role gives you access to everything within the website without limits to what you can do.
The admin, can decide which user can access what by assigning them with a user role. By default, WordPress offers 5 different user roles.
- Subscriber – Subscribers only have permission to read the published post.
- Contributor – Contributors can draft posts but they cannot publish them.
- Author – An author can write and publish his/her own posts.
- Editor – The editor can edit their own content and those drafted by other writers.
- Administrator – WordPress automatically assigned the role of the administrator to the website owner. This role has unlimited permissions like installing and activating plugins and themes, creating new user accounts, publishing content, assigning user role, etc. Basically, this role can do everything and anything he/she wants with the site.
The problem however is that sometimes these roles aren’t enough. That’s because the default WordPress option doesn’t allow you to add more specific permission levels to your users.
Luckily, there are plugins that lets you do that easily. Passster is one of them. So let’s look at what Passster is and how to use it to restrict WordPress content by user role.
What is Passster
Passster is one of the best WordPress plugins that lets you restrict access to your website content based on the user role.
With this plugin, you can restrict access to an entire page, a section of your website, or even the entire website. And all of this can be done without writing a single line of code.
How to Use Passster to Restrict Content by User Role
In this section, we’ll talk about how to use the Passster to restrict content based on user role. So let’s get started.
Step 1: Installing and Activating Passster
The first step is to install and activate Passster in your WordPress dashboard. For that, go to your WordPress dashboard and click on Plugins > Add New. Now using the search box find the Passster plugin.
Now click on Install Now > Activate Plugin. You’re now ready to use Passster to restrict access to your content based on user roles.
Step 2: Restrict Access to WordPress Content by User Role
Passster allows you to restrict access to your content in the form of pages as well as posts. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on how to do it for a page. You can follow the same steps to restrict access to your posts as well.
Now you have to go to the page based on which content you want to restrict access to. For that, on your WordPress dashboard, go to Pages > All Pages. Select the page you want to restrict access to. Now click on Edit.
Now on the right side of your screen under Pages, you’ll see an option called Activate Protection. Click on it to turn it on.
This will expand the Passster option. One of them is the Protection Mode. Under this option, you’ll see various protection mode options.
Based on the type of protection you want, select your protection mode.
- Password – This otion will allow the user to set a single password to access your page.
- Passwords – This option allows your users to enter different passwords to gain access. These passwords are comma separated.
- Password List – This option will let your user choose one of your pre-created password lists.
- reCAPTCHA – If you choose this, your users won’t require a password. It allows you to restrict bots and hackers on the page with reCAPTCHA.
Once you select your preferred protection mode you can proceed to the next step. In this post, we’ll select the Password option.
Now you can create a password by typing it in the field below. Now scroll down to activate the Misc Setting option.
Under this option, you’ll see another option labeled Redirect. In this field, you can type in the URL you want your users to be redirected to when they access your page.
Now activate the User Restriction option. Under this, you’ll see an option called User Role. In this option, click on the drop-down arrow to select the role of the user you want to restrict access to.
Once you’re done, you can click on the Update button on the top right corner of your screen. If its a new page you’ll see the Publish button instead of the Update button. Now the selected user role will only be able to access this page. All other visitors will need to enter a password to access it.
And that’s it. So that’s how to restrict a page by user role, but what if you only want to restrict part of a page or post? Don’t worry, with Passster that is possible too. Let’s check out how to do that in the following section.
How to Restrict Specific Section of Page or Post with Passster
Sometimes, you may not want to restrict a whole page or post but just part of it. When you enable this option, your pages or posts will be accessible to everyone, except for certain sections within the page.
This could be part of a page that contains sensitive information, like personal contact information (such as an email address), or account details for example. By restricting such information, you can protect yourself from spam or any cyber security threats.
You might also want to restrict part of a post or page to create a paywall, where users must pay to access the rest of a page or post. This is useful if you sell readable content like, a course, for example. Instead of letting your users access the entire content you might just want them to have a preview before they can commit their money.
In such cases, you can use Passster to protect specific sections of your content in your WordPress pages or posts and make it available to registered users only. Let’s see how you can do that.
Step 1: Create a Protected Area with Passster
Once you have activated the plugin, on your WordPress dashboard navigate to Passster > Protected Areas.
Now on your dashboard, click on the Add New Protected Area button.
This will open a new page just like a default WordPress page. On this page, you can add the content that you want to restrict like you would typically add content to your page.
Once you’re done, click on the Publish button at the top right corner of the page. This will automatically generate a shortcode for the section you want to restrict.
Step 2: Customize Your Protected Area Text
Now go to the backend of the published page. And go to Protected Area on the right side of your screen. Here again, you can select the Protection Mode and activate the User Restriction Type as we did in the above step.
Once you’re done, under the Overwrite Defaults option, you’ll be able to change the headline, description, placeholder, and button texts for your shortcode.
Now click on the Save button on the top right corner of your screen. This will save the changes you’ve just made. You’ll now see a button labeled Copy Shortcode at the end of your page. Copy this shortcode and exit your page.
Step 3: Add Restricted Content to Your Page
Now you’re done with creating the restricted content area. It’s time to add this content to your page.
So go to the page where you want to add this restricted content. For that, go to All Page in your WordPress dashboard. Now select the page where you want to add the content by clicking on Edit.
Once the page is open, you can paste the shortcode that you’ve just copied in the above step.
Now hit the Save button on the top right corner of your screen. Your restricted area has now been added to your page. The user role you have selected will now have to enter a password to access this area now.
It’s that easy to add restricted areas to your pages and post with Passster.
Conclusion
Restricting content by role on your WordPress website can be very helpful if you want to protect private content or sell exclusive content on your website. It’s a great way to ensure that only intended users can access such content on your website.
With Passster, you can do that in just a few clicks. So what are you waiting for?
Get Passster now and start limiting access to your content based on user roles on your website.