I needed a quick solution to hide a WordPress website without using the .htaccess and .htpasswd method, I found a little plugin to help.
Hide a staging WordPress website without .htaccess and .htpasswd
The classic method is to use a tool like https://www.web2generators.com/apache-tools/htpasswd-generator but we don’t always have all the access sometimes. If you can do this instead, it’s better.
A simple password protection plugin for the website front-end
So I looked into https://wordpress.org/plugins/hide-my-site/ it does the trick easily. This is used on a staging website where we don’t want visitors to see anything or robots to index the website either. It’s not super sensitive, I don’t know how robust the plugin is so it worked as a time/effort solutions for us. For sensitive content, I recommend looking into more robust server-side protection.
How does this “Hide My Site” WordPress plugin work? You just need to set a password and you are ready to go.
However, the design of the password page is ugly as fck… So you can copy the default template into your theme folder and strip all the non-necessary design elements of the form as you wish. Make it match your brand if you wish easily.