WordPress Private website – Registered users only

[sb]

Hi All,

I’m a newbie to both WordPress and Bulletproof Security, so I’ve just started learning, and I apologize if I’m repeating questions others have asked (although I did keyword searches before this post and could not get any hits in this forum).

1. My Situation
A. I have a domain that I pay a host to host for me
B. I have installed WordPress 3.5.1
C. I have installed BulletProof Security .48.8 (and I’m finally ALL GREEN on the Security Status page!)

2. My Goals
A. Maintain an invitee-only (family and close friends) blog
B. Prohibit access to my blog by anyone not invited (including search engines)
C. Require secure connection (https only) to the blog (no access via http) (For this, I’ve self-signed my own certificate.  It ain’t pretty, but as I mentioned, this blog is for family updates to family and friends—no financial transactions.

3. My Question
Since I’m new to both WordPress and BulletProof Security, I’m not sure how to take advantage of the best features of both to achieve my goals (above), or even if I can achieve my goals without installing additional plugins/features.  If you can help me, either directly, or through links that I can study, I’d be very grateful.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!
steady

[AITpro Admin]

If you would like to make your WordPress website private and not indexable to search engines then WordPress settings to do this can be found here.

Settings Panel >>> General settings >>> uncheck Anyone can register
Settings Panel >>> Reading settings >>> check Discourage search engines from indexing this site
Settings Panel >>> Discussion settings >>> uncheck Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article and Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). Check Users must be registered and logged in to comment.

[sb]

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply, especially since it seems that WordPress settings can handle most of the issues. I’m still looking for a way to keep search engines out (I don’t know that “discouraging” them is enough!)  🙂

Thank you again!
steady

[AITpro Admin]

All legitimate search engines will not index your site when you are using that setting.  non-legitimate search engines, spiders, crawlers do whatever they want anyway so there is nothing you can do about that, unless you create a membership type of site. You could install a plugin like S2Member to create a membership ONLY site.  If your entire site is going to be SSL then you would just use HTTPS and NOT HTTP on the Settings >>> General page.

WordPress Address (URL) https xxxxx
Site Address (URL) https xxxxx

[AITpro Admin]

Oh yeah I forgot about this WordPress option.  You can make your Posts Private/password protected.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Content_Visibility

[sb]

Thank you!  I will use a plugin (“Restricted Site Access”) to make this a member only blog–to keep spiders, bots, and whatever else out!

[Author]

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