5 Best WordPress Content Restriction Plugins

Do you want to restrict content on your WordPress site? Do you have some posts or pages that you only want to show to premium users?

Content restriction is a way to protect content from public view. It allows you to prevent your website visitors from viewing private or paid content on your website.

Website owners and publishers restrict content for various reasons, but the most common reason is monetization. Website owners can make money from their high-quality content by restricting access to them and charging a fee to unlock them.

Content restriction in WordPress is not that difficult, but you will need the help of a WordPress content restriction plugin to achieve this because the WordPress platform itself does not come with this feature.

What are WordPress Content Restriction Plugins?

WordPress content restriction plugins are software or tools that allow you to restrict access to your content in WordPress with ease and without any coding knowledge.

By using a content restriction plugin, you can require your visitors to pay or perform some tasks before gaining access to your premium content. Most of these plugins also allow you to build private or members-only pages that specific users can access on your website.

There are many content restriction plugins for WordPress, which makes it a bit challenging when deciding which one to use. In this article, we will look at some of the best content restriction plugins and their pricing and highlight their key features so that you can find the best solution for you.

Best Content Restriction Plugins for WordPress

In this section, we will look at 5 of the best WordPress content restriction plugins that can help you to restrict access to various segments of your WordPress site. These plugins can help you set up access controls and restrictions by user roles, membership plans, logged-in status and more.

1. ProfilePress

ProfilePress is one of the most popular membership and user profile plugins with over 300,000+ installations. It enables you to create membership sites, sell digital products, and restrict content on your WordPress website.

ProfilePress plugin allows you to restrict access to pages, child pages, posts, custom post types, categories, tags, and taxonomies on your WordPress website. It will enable you to restrict content using shortcodes and protection rules. ProfilePress has an intuitive user interface which makes it very easy to use.

Additionally, ProfilePress allows you to build paid membership websites, sell digital products, and manage member profiles. It supports integration with multiple payment gateways and third-party plugins, including WooCommerce and BuddyPress.

Key features: 

• Restrict Content to Premium Users
• Member and User profile management
• Easy paywall setup
• Payment gateway support includes Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay, Mollie, and Paystack.
• Email Marketing Integration
• Drag and drop form builder
• Use shortcodes for content restriction
• Restrict Menu items
• Supports block editor and page builders (Elementor and Beaver Builder).
• WooCommerce integration

2. Restrict Content

Restrict Content is another popular WordPress content restriction plugin. It allows you to restrict access to specific parts of your site or entire posts or pages using shortcodes or meta boxes.

The Restrict Content plugin is simple and lightweight. If you are looking for a plugin with just content restriction, then Restrict Content is a good choice. However, it is essential to note that the free version does not offer many features, so you might need to get the pro version to access most of its essential features.

Key features:

• Restrict access to WooCommerce products
• Supports multiple payment gateways
• Unlimited membership levels
• Restrict access based on user roles
• Email marketing integration

3. Ultimate Member

The Ultimate Member plugin is among the most popular WordPress membership plugins, with over 200,000+ installations. It allows you to easily add content restriction and membership functionality to your WordPress site.

Ultimate Member allows you to restrict content on entire posts, pages, or sections of a page or posts, ensuring only premium members can access restricted content. Apart from content restriction, this plugin will also enable you to build online communities and manage member profiles like the ProfilePress plugin mentioned above.

Key features:

• Drag and drop form builder
• Members management and profile creation
• Multiple gated content tiers
• Restricting content to premium users
• Supports WooCommerce restrictions for shop and product pages

4. PrivateContent

PrivateContent is another content restriction plugin for WordPress that gives you control over users’ access to various content on your website. With the PrivateContent plugin, you can restrict access to posts, pages, categories, widgets, and parts of pages or posts.

This plugin has an intuitive user interface that makes it easy to use, and it also supports shortcodes that allow you to restrict content on the fly. It also provides warning boxes and excerpt features, which can be used to restrict content and improve conversions.

Key features: 

• Warning boxes and excerpts functionality
• Supports shortcode for on-the-fly restrictions
• WooCommerce product price hiding
• Menu items restriction
• Supports Gutenberg block restriction
• Supports Elementor elements restrictions

5. Content Control – User Access Restriction

Content Control is a lightweight content restriction plugin that allows you to take control of your website’s content visibility by restricting access to pages and posts to logged-in users, specific user roles, or to logged-out users.

Content Control allows you to restrict access to media attachments on your WordPress pages and supports widget restrictions. You can configure the visibility of your sidebar of footer widgets based on user roles and logged-in status. It works with shortcodes, making restricting content on the fly easy.

Key features:

• Support shortcodes for content restriction
• Restrict Visibility of Widgets
• Restrict access to media attachments on pages
• Redirects users without required permissions
• Display a custom message to users without permissions
• Custom CSS for page elements.

Conclusion

WordPress content restriction plugins allow you to control access to your site content, such as pages, posts, widgets, comments, WooCommerce products, categories, and more.

In this article, we have looked at 5 of the best plugins you can use for content restriction and highlighted some of their key features. All of these plugins have been shown to have the capability to help you restrict content, build membership sites and monetize your website.

Your choice of the plugin will depend on your specific needs and the features you hope to use on your website. If you want to build a membership site and charge a fee, your best bet is to use the ProfilePress plugin, as it will allow you to restrict content, create membership plans and accept payments in your WordPress dashboard.