Creating a password protected page full of goodies is a wonderful way to get your audience to sign up for your newsletter and offer them something that is exclusively theirs! But, the standard password protected page wording is pretty bleh – so how do you customise the wording on your password protected WordPress.org page so that it is more informative to your readers? This post will show you how!
Getting started
WordPress makes it really easy to publish a password protected page. When you are in your page editor you will see a sidebar to the right. The very first tab is publish (unless you’ve added some other plugins then this may be pushed down by one or two)
In this tab you will see all your publishing options and in order to make your post private, you need to set the visibility to ‘password protected’ and then type in the password you would like to share with your subscribers.
Publish!
Customise the wording on your password protected WordPress.org page
Now the wording that appears to your audience on your password protected page is pretty standard and your audience may not know what the heck to do next.
My research has told me that the internet LOVES recommending that you edit your PHP files – um no! Firstly, DON’T. DO. IT. Secondly, don’t do it. Unless you absolutely, 100% know what you are doing, please don’t touch your PHP files – this can break your site and you will need to sort this out through your host. Pain in the derrière. Especially if you have a host who doesn’t respond immediately or you are in different time zones.
The easy peasy way to do this is to add some custom css to your CSS files and you don’t even need to access those files, you can add the CSS in the custom CSS box in your customizer screen. SO blooming easy peasy!
Step 1:
From your WordPress.org dashboard, navigate to the appearance tab in the sidebar on the left side of your page.
Step 2:
Select Customize
Step 3:
On the left hand side of your screen you will now see a list of options for you to customise. Near the bottom of this list you will see a tab that says Additional CSS. Click this and your page will now look like this:
Paste the following code into the space below where it says Additional CSS. If you already have some coding there, scroll down and below it paste:
.post-password-form p:first-child {
visibility: hidden;
}
.post-password-form p:first-child:before {
content: “Sign up on the home page to receive your password and gain access to our Free Resource Library“;
visibility: visible;
}
Be sure to paste EVERYTHING! Including the full stop and closing bracket. You can change the wording that is highlighted in pink to whatever you would like it to say. Hit publish and check out your new custom wording on your password protected page. NOTE: IF THE WORDING UNDERLINED ABOVE DOES NOT CHANGE, REMOVE THE QUOTATION MARKS AND RETYPE THEM IN MANUALLY AGAIN.
If you have any problems or the changes don’t show up, it has to do with the quotation marks normally. Just delete the quotation marks and add them in again.
WHOOO HOO! Well done you!