How To Password Protect A Website

If you're worried about people stealing the HTML you've used to design your web pages then you should consider some form of protection for your HTML source.

Whilst it is possible to use things like Javascript to disable people from right clicking their mouse on your web pages, this isn't much use. You can't disable the "View source" menu option on their browser.

You can make it difficult for a human to make sense of your source code by removing all line breaks with an HTML compressor - this makes your source code one (very) long line and will put off the casual source code thief. But a determined one would just write a quick program to add the line breaks back in.

The alternative is to use a program to encrypt your web page HTML source code in such a way that it can be interpreted OK by a web browser but all a human will see is a screen of gibberish.

One such program can be found here.

The advantage of using software is that it's brain dead easy. So long as you can locate a file on your hard drive and click a mouse, you can encrypt an HTML file, add password protection to a page, stop people from stealing your images and hide your affiliate links so that your customers won't know that you're making money from them.

Could you do this on your own?

• Encrypting your HTML - you'd need to write your own software to do this.


• Protecting your images - you can stop people linking to them but not much more.


• Password protecting a page - yes, using your .htaccess file so long as you're using a Unix-based host.


• Hiding affiliate links - there are programs out there such as Cloak and Tracker which will also keep count of your clicks and give you helpful stats.


• Stop your email being grabbed by spammers - there are Javascript programs you can use for this.


• Stop your website being framed - again, this can be done with Javascript.

At the end of the day, it's your decision and how much you value your time. You can then decide whether to spend hours searching for the various tools and testing whether they work as claimed or you can spend a few dollars on tried and tested software to do it for you.

One other thing you need to be careful about when you password protect your web pages is where you store your protected pages.

You should store these in a separate directory on your website.

Make sure that this directory has an index page in it otherwise, depending on your host, your users may be presented with a list of your pages.

Also use your robots.txt file to prevent any search engine robots from finding and indexing files in the directory. Be especially careful to exclude Alexa as well as the main search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Whilst you can password protect web pages using instructions available on the web, this takes time to produce and check. My personal view is that it's easier to use ready-made software to do this task unless you're 100% sure that what you're doing will work with every available web browser (not just Internet Explorer and maybe Firefox) and that all options have been covered. I've had too many occasions where I've made a simple typo and messed up the protection I was trying to make. But if you're totally confident you can get your work completely right and that you can do it quicker than spending a few dollars on some software, feel free to go ahead!