Decide Who Sees Your Site, and Who Sees Its Numbers
Two things shipped over the last fortnight, and they turn out to be halves of the same question: who gets to see this?
One lets you show someone your numbers without handing over your account. The other lets you show nobody anything at all until you’re ready. Both are free, on every site.
Password-protect a site while you build it
Open Settings, press Turn on password protection, and the site asks every visitor for a password before it shows them anything. We generate the password, and it covers every address the site answers on — your subdomain and any custom domains.
The obvious use is a site that isn’t finished. A holding page you’d rather wasn’t the first thing a client’s customers find. A rebuild running alongside the real thing. Anything you want online, shareable with the handful of people who need it, and invisible to everyone else — including search engines, which we also explicitly ask not to index it.
The password is meant to be handed out, so we don’t hide it after the first look. Come back any time, press Show, and read it again. There are separate copy buttons for the username and the password so each one pastes cleanly.
Be clear about what it is. This keeps crawlers and passers-by out. It is not a security boundary — one password, shared by everyone who has it, and we can show it back to you, which means it isn’t a secret we could keep even if we wanted to. Don’t put client files or personal data behind it. For keeping a work-in-progress out of Google, it’s exactly right.
How password protection works →
Share a site’s analytics with a client
The other half. You can now invite someone by email to see one site’s analytics, read-only.
They get an email saying who invited them and what they’ll be able to see. The link signs them in and drops them on the analytics. They don’t need an account first — if they’ve never used us, the link makes them a free one.
What they get is deliberately narrow: that site’s figures, and its name so they know what they’re looking at. Not your repository, not your deploy key, not your forms or bookings or domains, not your other sites, not your billing. They can’t invite anyone else either.
Remove them and it takes effect on their very next page load, not whenever a session happens to expire.
This is the thing people kept describing to us as “can I give my client a login?” — and the honest answer was that a login to your account is far too much. This isn’t that. It’s a window onto one site’s numbers, and nothing else.
Both free
Neither costs anything, on any site, including the free tier. Hosting stays free and fair-use; the paid add-ons are still Forms, Analytics and Bookings.
If you’ve been meaning to show someone what their site is doing, or you’ve got something half-built you’d rather Google didn’t find, they’re both a click away in Settings.
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