My Private Site – Make Your Whole Site Private, Force Login & Block Registration Spam vs UpdraftPlus

My Private Site makes your WordPress site private so only logged-in users can see your content. With one click, you can restrict access to all posts and pages, automatically redirect visitors to the login screen, and keep your site visible only to people you trust. Unlike full membership or subscription systems, My Private Site focuses on strong privacy without unnecessary complexity. It is ideal for family sites, schools, clubs, client previews, or development environments where you want to share content with a trusted audience without managing payments, profiles, or custom roles. Ideal Use Cases Family sites and school projects: Share personal updates, photos, or assignments only with family members, classmates, or teachers you choose. Development and staging sites: Safely show work-in-progress to clients or teammates without exposing unfinished content or letting it be indexed by search engines. Clubs, groups, and internal blogs: Create a private online space for members or staff without the overhead of a complex membership system. Digital Fortress protection My Private Site helps protect the “front door” of your private site with built-in safeguards for login and user registration, including registration spam protection and optional reCAPTCHA support. If spam accounts already exist, the Spam Account Cleanup tool helps preview, export, and batch-delete suspicious basic user accounts with protections for online store customers and confirmations. It also includes AI Crawler Defense to discourage automated collection of your site’s content. Key Features Make your entire WordPress site private with a single setting Redirect logged-out visitors automatically to the login page Choose where users land after login (requested page, home, dashboard, or custom URL) Support user self-registration on private sites when enabled Protect registration with built-in spam controls and optional reCAPTCHA Safely preview, export, and batch-delete spam subscriber accounts with the Spam Account Cleanup tool, while protecting detected EDD and WooCommerce customers Optionally block unauthenticated access to the WordPress REST API Simple, no-code setup using standard WordPress settings Privacy shortcode lets you selectively show or hide content within a page or post. Built-in Registration Spam Guard Fake registrations can quickly fill your user list and trigger a flood of notification emails. My Private Site includes Registration Spam Guard controls that help block automated signups before they become user accounts: * Registration reCAPTCHA: Adds an optional reCAPTCHA challenge to the WordPress registration form and rejects unsolved or unverifiable submissions. * Honeypot field: Adds an invisible registration field that normal visitors do not fill in, but many bots do. * Gibberish username detection: Blocks long, randomly mixed usernames often generated by registration bots. * Reserved administrator usernames: Blocks self-registrations that impersonate common site identities such as admin or webmaster. * URL-like username detection: Blocks usernames that look like domains or URLs, including phishing-style hosted page addresses. * Crypto scam phrase detection: Blocks usernames that carry common bait phrases such as balance checks, transfer notices, or withdrawal prompts. * Excessive email dots: Blocks email addresses with unusually dotted local parts commonly used in bulk fake accounts. * Suspicious Gmail plus aliases: Blocks Gmail plus-address aliases with random-looking tracking codes often seen in automated spam bursts. * Digit-dominant and gibberish email checks: Optional default-off checks for mostly numeric or random-looking email local parts. * Missing MX records: Blocks registrations when the email domain is not configured to receive mail. * Disposable email domains: Blocks common throwaway email services, including matching subdomains. * StopForumSpam lookup: Checks registrants against the StopForumSpam database. Each Registration Spam Guard option can be enabled separately, and registration reCAPTCHA can be enabled independently from login reCAPTCHA while sharing the same keys. When enabled, reCAPTCHA protects the standard WordPress registration form, and selected spam checks also block suspicious unauthenticated account-creation attempts from other public entry points, such as REST API, XML-RPC, admin-ajax, and custom registration forms. Blocked attempts are logged in the Spam Log area for quick review. Spam Account Cleanup If a site has already been hit by fake subscriber accounts, My Private Site includes a staged Spam Account Cleanup tool in Advanced settings. It previews basic users, applies hard protections for detected EDD and WooCommerce customers, store-order accounts, content authors, site managers, recently active users, and uploaded mailing lists, exports the exact dry-run queue to CSV, and only deletes after a backup acknowledgment and typed confirmation. Deletion runs in resumable browser-driven batches, reassigns any unexpectedly found WordPress content to the current admin instead of deleting it, and includes an optional orphaned usermeta sweep for metadata rows that no longer belong to any user. Built-in AI Crawler Defense The internet is rapidly changing, with AI crawlers and bots harvesting content without consent. My Private Site helps you defend your work with integrated AI Crawler Defense features: * NoAI and NoImageAI tags: Automatically add meta tags and headers that signal compliant AI systems not to use your text or images for training. * Block GPTBot: Add a robots.txt rule to prevent OpenAI’s crawler from accessing your site. * Really Simple Licensing (RSL): Publish a machine-readable license that explicitly prohibits AI training on your content. These protections are included free in the core plugin, easy to enable with a checkbox, and designed to safeguard your site without affecting normal visitors or search engines. You can use them even if you’re not using any other site privacy features. Watch the Video Overview and Demo Premium Add-ons Premium add-ons turn My Private Site into a comprehensive privacy suite, giving you enterprise-style layered security defenses, smarter oversight, and flexible access, without the complexity or cost. Advanced AI Crawler Defense, Visitor Intelligence, and Block IP provide protections regardless of whether you’re using any site privacy features. Public Pages 2.0: Allows site operators to designate certain specific pages, or pages with specified prefix, to be available to the public without login. Now also allows public site, private pages. Watch the video Advanced AI Crawler Defense: Protect WordPress content from AI crawlers using licensing, opt-out tags, selective bot blocking, and firewall defenses to control and safeguard your data. Watch the video Visitor Intelligence: Track logins, logouts, failed attempts, and bot activity with a unified log, anomaly detection, and export tools for stronger site oversight and security. Watch the video Guest Access: Grant temporary, secure access to private WordPress content using unique shareable links with expiration, one-time use, and full admin-controlled invite management. Watch the video Block IP: Block unwanted visitors by IP address or range with full IPv4/IPv6 support, configurable scope, and fast enforcement to secure your WordPress site. Watch the video Tags & Categories: Allows you to make pages public or (with Public Pages 2.0) private based on tags and categories. Watch the video Selective Content: Allows hiding, showing, and obscurifying page content through the use of shortcodes. Can also selectively hide widgets and sidebars. Watch the video Digital Fortress Bundle: All add-ons are available in bundle form. Watch the video Limits This plugin does not hide non-WordPress web pages, such as .html and .php files. It also won’t restrict images and other media and text files directly accessed by their URL. If your hosting provider’s filesystem protections haven’t been set up correctly, files may also be accessed by directory listing. Support Note Support has moved to the ZATZLabs site and is no longer provided on the WordPress.org forums. If you need a timely reply from the developer, please open a ticket. Mailing List If you’d like to keep up with the latest updates to this plugin, please visit David’s Lab Notes and add yourself to the mailing list.

The UpdraftPlus Backup & Migration Plugin is trusted by the WordPress community to backup, restore and migrate their WordPress websites. UpdraftPlus is actively installed on more than 3 million websites around the world. Backup with UpdraftPlus UpdraftPlus is the world’s highest ranking and most popular scheduled backup and migration plugin. Backup to your preferred storage location and restore in just three clicks. Backup to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift or email. The paid version also allows you to backup to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, pCloud, WebDAV or UpdraftVault, our integrated storage option for UpdraftPlus. Backup manually or schedule to run every 2, 4, 8 or 12 hours, daily, weekly, monthly or fortnightly. Restore with UpdraftPlus Your WordPress website is vulnerable. Your site may get hacked. Something could go wrong with an update or your server could crash. You might need to reverse a change made or a mistake caused by human error. Whatever the reason, you can restore your WordPress website in just a few clicks with UpdraftPlus. Choose which components to restore (e.g. plugins, themes, database etc.), click again to restore, then click again to return to the main screen. Migrate with UpdraftPlus It’s easy to migrate your WordPress website to another web host, server or domain with this free version of UpdraftPlus. To migrate, simply download your database, plugins, themes etc. from the source site, then upload them into your destination site. When migrating, a built-in search-and-replace engine identifies old strings and replaces these to reflect the new location. UpdraftPlus saves you time and reduces the risk of broken links or missing files associated with manual migrations. Why UpdraftPlus? Writing a reliable backup and migration plugin that ‘just works’ consistently across millions of different WordPress deployments is hard. UpdraftPlus is relied upon to do exactly that. We’re trusted and actively deployed on more websites around the world than any other WordPress backup and migration plugin. UpdraftPlus: Backs up, migrates and restores Offers a huge number of remote storage locations Allows you to schedule backups, so you can ‘set and forget’ Is comprehensive and easy to use Is proven to work on over 3 million sites. UpdraftPlus Premium The free version of UpdraftPlus will back up and migrate your website perfectly well. However if you need more features and options you can purchase our Premium version. Backup and Migrate with UpdraftPlus Premium, and: Get automatic backups before updates. Restore the very latest version if a WordPress or plugin update breaks your site. Backup Incrementally. Changes are added to the master, saving server resources vs repeatedly backing up in full. Get more remote storage options including Microsoft OneDrive, SFTP, Microsoft Azure, WebDAV, Google Cloud, SCP, Backblaze and pCloud. Get 1GB of integrated storage with UpdraftVault for 99.999% reliability, redundancy and scalability. Get more control over how many backups are stored in a specified interval. Restore from other backup plugins including BackWPup, BackupWordPress, Simple Backups and more. Run backups at set times e.g. during periods of low traffic. Backup to more than one location for added protection. Get detailed reports. Includes cryptographic checksums so you can verify the integrity of the backup files and more. Get Premium migration. Migrating to the destination site is more direct and can be done from the source site. Get Multisite / multi-network compatibility. Backup non-WP files and databases e.g. tables belonging to your e-commerce store or customisations to WordPress core. Get database encryption. Manage your backups and migrations from the WP-CLI. Get Premium Support. Find out more on our comparison page. UpdraftPlus Premium is available for purchase here. Managing multiple websites? UpdraftCentral is a powerful remote control dashboard for WordPress that allows you to manage your backups, as well as updates, users, pages, posts, plugins and themes from one central location. Choose between: UpdraftCentral (free, self-hosted) UpdraftCentral Premium (paid-for, self-hosted) UpdraftCentral Cloud (paid-for, fully-hosted) Optimize your sites centrally by combining the power of WP-Optimize and UpdraftCentral or manage your backups centrally by combining the power of UpdraftPlus with UpdraftCentral. Need to create a temporary clone of your site? UpdraftClone makes it quick and easy to create a temporary sandbox for changes you want to try out. Simply select the versions of WordPress and PHP that you want, and we’ll do the rest. More about UpdraftClone The full suite of plugins from Team Updraft and friends UpdraftPlus. Backup, migrate and restore. Rated 5* on the plugin directory and trusted by more than 3 million WordPress website owner WP-Optimize. Clean the database, compress images and caching. Optimize your WordPress website. 5* user rating. 1 million + active installs. All-In-One Security (AIOS). Secure your WordPress website. Comprehensive, feature rich and easy to use. 5* user rating and 1 million + active installs. WP Overnight. Quality Extensions for your WooCommerce store. 5* rated invoicing, order and product management, customer management solutions and more. Easy Updates Manager. Take control of updates. Lots of features for free, and a Premium version with even more – over 300,000 users. Internal Link Juicer.Boost your SEO. Automate internal links within your WordPress website. Save time and rank higher in the search engines. For other useful, free plugins see our lead developer’s profile, here. Are you multilingual? Can you translate? Do you want to help people that speak your language to backup, migrate and restore their WordPress websites? The UpdraftPlus backup, migration and restoration plugin is ready and waiting. The translation process is easy, and web-based – please go here for instructions: https://updraftplus.com/translate/. Or, if you’re already an expert WordPress translator, just pick out the .pot file from the wp-content/plugins/updraftplus/languages/ directory – if you scan for translatable strings manually, then you need to get these functions: _x(), __(), _e(), _ex(), log_e(). Many thanks to our existing translators. License Copyright 2011-24 David Anderson This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA Non-English translators are provided by volunteers, and wordpress.org does not give plugin developers control over their translations; thus relying on them is at your own risk; UpdraftPlus cannot guarantee that translations from the original English are accurate. We recognise and thank those mentioned at https://updraftplus.com/acknowledgements/ for code and/or libraries used and/or modified under the terms of their open source licences.