Site-wide passwords

Prevent visitors from accessing your content unless they have a password.

Last updated January 24, 2025

You can hide your site behind a password to prevent it from being publicly accessible. While your site is password-protected, visitors need to enter the password to open your site. This can be helpful if your site is under construction or if only certain people should access it.

Everyone uses the same password to access your site's content. It's not possible to create unique passwords for different people.

Tip

To give people individual viewing or editing permissions for your site, invite them as contributors. To create gated content that only some visitors can access, add Member Sites to your site.

Before you begin

  • Passwords are case-sensitive.
  • For security reasons, never use your Squarespace account password as a site-wide password.
  • When typing a password, a series of dots will appear instead of text, like •••••••••••••. This may appear longer than your actual password.
  • When a visitor uses a password, the session expires after four hours and prompts them to re-enter the password. It's not possible to "log out" of a session.
  • Visitors need to enter the password before their visit counts in your site's traffic analytics.
  • Customers can't complete the checkout process if you have a site-wide password enabled. Ensure you disable the site-wide password if you're selling on your site.
  • You can also password protect individual pages. For more options for hiding your content, visit Controlling who can access your site's pages.
  • Sites on the discontinued cover page plan can't be hidden behind a password.
  • If you’re on our Enterprise plan, you can also set up single sign-on to view your site.

Set a site-wide password

To set a password:

  1. Open the Site Availability panel.
  2. Select Password Protected in the drop-down menu.
  3. Enter the password visitors will use to view your site.
  4. Click Save.
password_protected.jpg
  1. Tap More, then tap Settings.
  2. Tap Site Availability
  3. Tap Password Protected, and enter the password visitors will use to view your site in the field below.
  4. Tap Save to save your changes.

Test your password

Open your site in a private browser window to test how it appears to visitors. At the lock screen, enter the password, then press Enter or click the arrow to access the site.

The gray lock screen pictured below displays by default. Use the lock screen panel to customize the design.

image1.jpg

Change or remove the password

To change the password:

  1. Open the Site Availability panel.
  2. Enter a new password.
  3. Click Save.

To remove the password:

  1. Open the Site Availability panel.
  2. Select Public or Private.
  3. Click Save.

If you set your site to Public, it's accessible to all visitors and to search engines. Only paid sites can be public. If you choose Private, it will only be accessible to the site owner and contributors.

  1. Tap More, then tap Settings.
  2. Tap Site Availability
  3. Tap Password Protected, and enter a new password in the field below.
  4. Tap Save.

To remove the password, tap another site availability option. 

Passwords and search engines

While you’re building a trial site, your site can be set to Private or Password Protected. Both options hide your site from search engines.

If you're hiding your site after it's already been set to Public, setting a password prevents search engines from indexing it further. This means that search engines may have already indexed your site before you added the password, and your content could appear in search results.

After you add a site-wide password, your site won't be accessible to search engines. It will eventually stop appearing in search results.

Troubleshooting site-wide password issues

For site-wide passwords:

  • If visitors are prompted to enter a password after you remove the site-wide password, check if your homepage has a page password, and disable it.
  • Some password managers or browser extensions (like LastPass) can cause passwords to auto-fill in your site availability settings. If this is happening, disable the browser extension before adding or changing a site-wide password.
  • If you paste the password text into the field from elsewhere, it may keep some text formatting that causes it to be incorrect. We recommend pasting it as plain text or typing the password manually.
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