Congratulations! You’ve made a great choice and are on your way to getting your private WordPress media files protected!
First things first, please make sure you’ve installed and activated Prevent Direct Access Gold license successfully on your website. If you’re using IIS and NGNIX hosting such as WPEngine and Bitnami, please make sure that you follow our instructions to configure our plugin’s redirect rules accordingly. Otherwise, your private files won’t be protected properly.
Now that you’ve got our PDA Gold version set up correctly, it’s time to start protecting your private media files!
Start with Settings: Set File Access Permission
First of all, let’s set some basic settings for your private files. Under your WordPress admin, click on “Prevent Direct Access Gold” to access our plugin’s settings.
- Set File Access Permission (FAP): who can access your protected files (through its protected file URL), i.e. file’s author, admins or logged-in users
After that, you can set a different FAP for each file. - Set no access page: where to redirect unauthorized users to when they attempt to access your private files. Default: 404 page
- Auto-protect new file uploads: protect your future uploaded files automatically
- Enable other security options
Depending on your circumstances, you may want to enable “prevent hotlinking”, “disable directory listing” and “hide WordPress version” options.
Find out about all Settings options provided by Prevent Direct Access (PDA) Gold.
Protect Your Private Files Directly Under Media Library
- Go to Media library
- Locate the files you want to protect, preferably under List view
- Protect them with just a single click
Please note that since PDA Gold version 3.0, when a media file is protected, its file URL is actually changed to something like this:
https://pda.com/wp-content/uploads/_pda/2018/12/sample-document.pdf
So if you already embed the file in your content, you have to either update the file URL manually or use our “Search & Replace” feature. Otherwise, your files will get “404 not found” error.
See it in action
For more information, please check out these tutorials and blog posts below:
