How to Hide Pages in WordPress

Hide WordPress pages using visibility and publishing settings.

WordPress is a blogging platform, but many website owners use it as a content management system similar to Drupal or Joomla. You can create pages and control how and when visitors see them from the WordPress dashboard. Turn off a page's visibility, put it behind a password, edit its status to "draft" or just take its links off your menus if you want to hide its content. You can always make pages visible again after taking them off the portions of your website that face the public.

Instructions

1. Navigate to "Pages" within the WordPress dashboard and click on the title of a page you want to hide. Locate the "Publish" box on the "Edit Page" screen, which you can find to the right of the screen or below the editor box. Click the "Edit" link next to "Public" and select either "protected" or "private" for the page's visibility setting. Click "OK" and then update the page to save your changes.

2. Navigate to "Pages" in the dashboard and go to the page you want to hide. Find the "Publish" box, located on the side of the editor box or below the editor. Click the "Edit" link next to "Published" and select "draft" to remove the page from the WordPress front-end. Though visitors cannot see the page, you can continue to edit and publish it again later.

3. Go to "Menus" under "Appearance" in the WordPress dashboard. Click on each menu tab at the top of the screen and check your menus for links to the page you want to hide. Where you find the page, click the "Down" arrow on its grey bar and click the red "Remove" link. Removing links to the page will not take the page down from your site, but visitors will need to know the URL to find the page.

Tips & Warnings

• Use a plugin to set up a paywall for pages containing premium content. You can also install plugins that only give your community members access to certain pages.

• If you leave a page visible and published, then note that visitors can often guess the URL to get to a page after you take it down from your navigation menus. Users who bookmarked the page can still get to it as well.