It’s rare that we would want to lock up our website with a password. However, there might be few occasions when we need to protect a few pages of our site (or whole) from the general public and made accessible to a selected group of users. For such times, here are 5 neat free tools that will help you get started.
Bravenet Password Protect
Bravenet Password Protect is an online tool with which you can provide a login form on your site. The real address of your page will remain hidden, so that readers cannot bypass the login.
The tool comes as part of Bravenet’s various site hosting services. After you login to your Bravenet use dashboard, you can access the Password Protect tool that will allow you to configure the user name and password of the webpage you want to protect. You can then copy the Javascript that you need to add to your website to complete the protection.
With the free edition, you can create up to 50 user accounts. The tool also provides you some features like allowing readers to request password from you, and banning users by their IP addresses. There is a pro edition that comes for USD 6.95 per month with which you can remove the ads, protect up to 500 pages, use server-side authentication, create custom error pages, and password form.
.htaccess Password Generator
.htaccess Password Generator is a simple online form that you can use to generate the codes to password-protect your site. To use the form, you need to add your username, password, path to your .htaccess file, and the names of the files to be protected. It will then generate a set of codes that you can add to your .htaccess file, and another set of codes that you need to save as a .htpasswd text file and upload it in your server.
The tool is really simple with the advantage that you don’t need to link up your site with any third party like Bravenet above.
Javascript Kit Password Protecting
Javascript Kit Password Protecting provides you six free Javascripts you can use to password-protect your website, create a login form, and generate random passwords. The Javascript Kit page mentioned that ‘Javascript may not be the best way to password-protect a webpage, but for those who do not have access to a CGI-BIN, it may very well be the only way… and will keep out at least the average surfer’. So there it is. It is up to you to decide whether this suits you or not.
Javascript Kit Password Protecting provides you six free Javascripts you can use to password-protect your website, create a login form, and generate random passwords. The Javascript Kit page mentioned that ‘Javascript may not be the best way to password-protect a webpage, but for those who do not have access to a CGI-BIN, it may very well be the only way… and will keep out at least the average surfer’. So there it is. It is up to you to decide whether this suits you or not.
PoppyDog Passsword Protector
PoppyDog Passsword Protector is a neat free online tool to password protect your web pages. In order to use the tool, you need to log in as a member at the PoppyDog site and access your member dashboard. You can add the password protector tool to your dashboard from where you can set the password protection form, user and passwords, and secure upto 10 webpages with different passwords. You can protect unlimited number of web pages when you become a professional subscriber at PoppyDogwith a USD 5 per month fee.
The tool also provides a Javascript to protect your pages further and deny direct access to bookmarked pages. PoppyDog also provides a registration and a login system for your website. The set up is simple and there are other interesting tools that you can experiment with.
Zubrag Wegpage Password Protect
Zubrag Wegpage Password Protect is a free PHP code that you can use to password-protect your website. The script will show a password entry form to readers. You can create multiple user accounts, and automatic/manual logouts.
To use this script, you need to upload it somewhere on your sever, add your login IDs and passwords using a test editor. Then you need to open the script in a browser with the ‘help’ parameter to see your code that you need to add to the top of your web page. Zubrag also has a support forum to assist you in setting up the script.
