How to Hide a Page in WordPress (4 Smart Ways)

As a webmaster, you would like more and more people to visit your site. Still, there are scenarios when you want to keep some pages private. In this post, we’ll show you how to hide a page in WordPress.

When to hide a WordPress page or post?

You tell me! Well, never mind. Besides the reason that made you think of hiding a WordPress page, there’s more. Let’s see some common “WordPress hide page” cases.

• The page is not complete yet. Maybe you’re testing a styling feature of your WordPress theme on a page. You might want to keep that experiment private.
• It’s intended for a select group of users only. Can be a single page or a collection of pages.
• The page is complete, but you don’t want to show it to the visitors right now. However, you want it to be online so that the search engines can index the page. Or vice versa.

These are the most common reasons that you would want to hide a page in WordPress. You can hide a WordPress blog post or page in multiple ways. 

In fact, there are a bunch of built-in options for this. Plus, you can use some WordPress hidden page plugins for more advanced capabilities. Let’s explore these one by one. Shall we?

Built-in options to hide a WordPress page

There are 4 prebuilt options in WordPress to control the visibility or privacy of your page/post. You’ll find these useful instantly in your hidden page WordPress journey.

First, sign in to your WordPress dashboard and start with creating a new page or post. You’ll find the following options in your post or page editor.

Draft: This is the very basic level of hiding your WordPress post or page. Usually, when a page is not complete, it’s automatically saved as a draft. You can keep a page or post as a draft until you think it’s finished.

If you want to keep a page private until it’s done, saving it as a draft is a great option. Usually, the admins & editors of the site can access a draft page. This way, a team can collaborate on that page privately as long as they want.

The following three are the main built-in options to control WordPress page/post privacy. You’ll get them in the Visibility section on the WordPress post/page editing interface.

Public: If you choose this option, the page or post will be published to the public. Anyone can view its content. It’s the default publishing status of WordPress pages and posts.

Private: Once your WordPress page or post is complete, you can choose to declare it “private” officially. 

When a page is saved as a draft, that means it’s still under development. In the worst case, someone can publish it by accident. This involves the risk of compromising confidential information. To prevent such a situation, you can publish the page as “private”.

A hidden WordPress page that is set as “private” is accessible by the site admins and editors. They can visit the page as long as they’re signed in to the site.

Password Protected: This option is very straightforward. You can lock a post with a password. When anyone visits the post/page link, they will be asked for the password. If they can enter the password, they will be able to view the page content. 

Learn More: How to Edit Your WordPress Title Tag (3 Easy Ways)

How to hide a page in WordPress using plugins

WordPress plugins can offer much more functionalities than you could even imagine. You’ll just need to install and activate a hide content or restrict content plugin from the backend navigation menu.

In this case, for hiding WordPress pages, plugins empower a big deal of extra milage. Some of these perks are described below.

Hide from the front page or archives: You can use a plugin like WP Hide Posts to hide your WordPress post/page from the front page and/or archives. The plugin will show you a set of options on the post editing page to choose from.

Hide from internal searches: You can hide a post from WordPress internal search using the Search Exclude plugin. If you want to prevent a page from being appeared in your on-site search results, then this plugin will come in handy.

Hide from Google or other search engines: Surprised? Don’t be! Sometimes webmasters want to prevent some pages from being indexed by search engines. A plugin like Yoast SEO can add this request for the search engines to your desired page.

To use this option, go to the Advanced section of the Yoast SEO panel on your page/post editing interface.

Do you want to hide the page title or entry title for pages/posts on your WordPress site? If you don’t want to hide an entire post, you can still hide the post’s page title in WordPress. You can do it using the following custom CSS.

.page-id-0 .entry-title {
display: none;
}

Replace the post ID with your applicable one.

To hide the title of a WordPress page, simply remove the title by editing the page. You can learn more about this from here.

Wrapping up

If you want to hide a post or page in WordPress, there are multiple ways to go. In this article, we’ve tried to show the major methods. Plus, if you are familiar with coding, you can achieve this by adding some custom code to your site. 

Also, you’ll get many plugins to achieve what you want. 

Was this post helpful? Please share your thoughts and experience with us via comments. Happy hiding!