Password Protecting Your Website: How To Keep Your Content Safe

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.

Password protecting your website will help keep parts of your website private. The degree of security you achieve will be a function of the protection method you've chosen. 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.

Begin by logging into the control panel on your web host. 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 a quick and easy 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.

For those who don't like to mess around with control panel options - or where your control panel doesn't offer the option - there are other ways. 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.