It’s necessary to update and make your WordPress website more lively with new blogs. Relevant content creates a better chance for your site to be visible on search results and receive traffic.
WordPress will display the latest posts on your homepage or the archive page by default. Once landing on your site or your blog, visitors can see a list of articles and can read related ones for more information. This helps increase the time on site of users and concurrently makes you an authority in the niche.
However, you sometimes want to hide several of your pages and posts from the homepage. Sound ridiculous? In fact, a lot of site owners try to hide controversial content from the main homepage. Some others would feature their own blogs on the homepage rather than guest posts.
In this article, we’ll go into how to hide pages and posts from your WordPress homepage with an easy-to-use plugin. Before we begin, lets quickly take a look at the reasons why site owners have to shield their content.
Why hiding posts from the homepage in WordPress?
As mentioned, it’s not ideals to release content then hide it from the public or the archive page. Here are 2 strong arguments that site owners deploy to explain their action:
- Shield private content
You want to express your point of view on some trending and controversial topics, but the content is quite sensitive which should not be displayed on the main page. Hiding this content could prevent audiences that have opposite opinions from seeing it and leaving unwanted comments.
- Hide guest posts
Everyone uses guest posts to promote their websites, products, or services, in a direct or indirect way. You can accept guest posts from experts to contribute to your website content. Still, it’s not necessary to feature their content at the top of your homepage.
You can hide these guest posts from the homepage or the archive page to let users focus on your own content. In spite of not showing up on the homepage, these guest blogs are visible to readers via search results.
How to hide a post from the homepage in WordPress
Primary coming as a content protection plugin, Protect WordPress Pages and Posts (PPP) permits you to secure your content, and at the same time hides it from different places.
Unlike password protection plugins that lock your pages, posts, and custom post types with passwords, PPP protects your content by redirecting users to a 404 error page when attempting to access it. What’s more, you’re authorized to shield the protected content from many pages right in the settings page.
The plugin proves easy to set up and use. Once downloading, installing, and activating the plugin to your WordPress site, you need to:
- Go to Pages or Posts in your WordPress admin dashboard
- Click Configure protection on your desired content
- Hit Protect this post button. After that, head to the plugin main settings page and choose the places to hide your protected pages and posts from.
- Visit the Content Protection section
- Scroll down to Hide Protected Content
- Select Front page from the dropdown. There are 2 different options for pages and posts
- Save your changes
Protect WordPress Pages and Posts plugin’s advanced settings
Apart from hiding pages and posts from the homepage, there are a lot more you can do with the PPP plugin.
General settings
It’s possible for you to make the content invisible in other places such as Category pages, Tag pages, Author pages, Internal Serch Results pages, or even the RSS feed, and so on.
Since you can set access permission for your secure content, it won’t be private from everyone. This differentiates the plugin from the default private status provided by WordPress. There are various user roles you can grant access to, from author to logged-in users, etc.
What’s more, instead of sending unwanted users to a 404 page when accessing the protected content, you can redirect them to a custom page such as the notification or policy pages.
Keep worrying that users might print out your private content? PPP plugin can handle it without hassle. You simply need to enable the “Prevent Printing Protected Content” option right in the plugin general settings page.
IP address restriction
It’s not exaggerated to say that PPP is an all-in-one content protection solution. Its features listed above are just the tip of an iceberg. The plugin brings content security to a higher level by allowing specific IPs to open your protected pages and posts.
Plan to block people from a specific region? Just add the asterisk (*) for wildcard matching. For example, 7.7.7.* will match IP from 7.7.7.0 to 7.7.7.255.
Access link creation
If you want several people to view your secure content without creating user roles and setting access permission, create custom private links. These links are designed to let users open and read your content in a given time or a number of clicks only.
You can generate these links right after protecting a page and or post. The plugin also supports customizing the links to make them more meaningful and memorable to users.
Make use of WordPress hidden pages and posts
Not all your blogs and pages should be displayed on the homepage or other archive pages. Sensitive content and guest posts are typical examples. Rather than featuring posts written by others, it’s ideal to hide them from the homepage so that your content is always listed at the top.
The Protect WordPress Pages and Posts plugin makes it easy for you to shield the content from the homepage as well as many other places with a few simple clicks. It also assists you in securing content, such as preventing users from printing posts, restricting IP addresses, and more.
Install Protect WordPress Pages and Posts plugin to have your WordPress content hidden from the homepage now!
