Working on a site you’d rather nobody stumbled across yet? Turn on password protection and every visitor is asked for a password before they see anything. Free, on every site, and it takes one click.
Turning it on
Open your site, go to Settings, find Password protection and press Turn on password protection.
That’s it. We generate a password for you and the site is protected straight away, on every
address it answers on — your .my.statichost.uk subdomain and any custom domains you’ve
added.
Sharing the password
The username and password are shown in that same panel. Press Show to read the password, or Copy to put it on the clipboard. There are separate copy buttons for the username and the password, so each one pastes cleanly on its own.
Unlike most credentials, this one is meant to be handed out — to a client, a colleague, someone reviewing your work — so you can come back and read it again whenever you like. We don’t hide it after the first look.
Generate a new password replaces it. Anyone still using the old one is locked out immediately, so only do that when you mean to.
What it is, and what it isn’t
This keeps search engines and casual visitors out. That’s what it’s for, and it does it well: a crawler that can’t get past the password can’t index your pages, and we also tell search engines not to index the site while protection is on.
It is not a security boundary. Everyone shares one password, anyone you give it to can pass it on, 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 anything confidential behind it: no client files, no personal data, no members’ area.
If you need real access control, the site itself isn’t the right place for it.
Logging out
There isn’t a log-out button, because your browser handles the password, not us. Browsers remember it for the rest of the session, so closing the browser (or using a private window) is how you get the prompt back.
Turning it off
Press Turn off — make the site public again. The site is public immediately.
Your password isn’t thrown away when you do that, so switching protection off and on again won’t strand anyone still holding it. Only Generate a new password changes it.
Search engines will find the site again on their own once it’s public, though it can take a while — that’s up to them, not us.
