A member of your website is a visitor who has registered to create a profile using their email address. You can have gated content on your site by creating a ‘Site members only’ page, or by changing the ‘Access’ settings for an existing page.

You can also require that visitors be signed up as site members and logged in to leave comments in your ‘Blog’ feature, or post in a ‘Forum’ feature.

Note: If you have a ‘Subscriptions’ area set up on your website, anyone who joined as a subscriber is also automatically a site member and can access pages and features restricted to site members only

This Help article includes the following:

  • Creating a ‘Site members only’ page
  • Changing the ‘Access’ settings of an existing page
  • Restricting your ‘Blog,’ ‘Guestbook,’ or ‘Forum’ feature comments to ‘Site members only’

Creating a 'Site members only' page

Setting a new page to ‘site members only’ will require that visitors supply an email address, select a password, and create a profile in order to see the page content. Anyone who isn’t registered as a site member and signed in will only see a prompt to register or login.

To create a new ‘Site members only’ page, follow these steps:

  1. Click on the ‘Edit Content’ tab
  2. Click the circular ‘Pages’ Button on the left
  3. Select ‘Add a page’
  4. Select a Page Type. Any of these page types can be set to ‘Site members only’
  5. Name your page in the ‘Title’ field
  6. Under the ‘Access’ settings, select ‘Site members only’
  7. Click ‘Create my page’

Changing the ‘Access’ settings of an existing page

You can decide to change the accessibility options for an existing page and switch it to ‘Site members only’ at any time.

How to change an existing page to ‘Site members only:’

  1. Click on the ‘Edit Content’ tab
  2. Click the circular ‘Pages’ Button on the left
  3. Click the cog icon next to the name of the page you’d like to edit
  4. Under the ‘ACCESS’ settings, select ‘Site members only’
  5. Click ‘Save’

Restricting your ‘Blog,’ ‘Guestbook,’ or ‘Forum’ feature comments to ‘Site members only’

The ‘Blog’ feature can be set to require that visitors be logged in as site members before they can comment on a post. This is a great way to prevent spam comments from appearing on your blog.

To restrict blog comments to ‘Site members only,’ follow these steps:

  1. Click on the ‘Edit Content’ tab
  2. Navigate to the page containing your blog
  3. Click on the blog to open the feature settings
  4. Click ‘Blog Settings’ on the left
  5. Toggle on ‘Require user to be signed in to post a comment’
  6. Click ‘Save’

Similarly, the ‘Guestbook’ and ‘Forum’ features can be set to require that visitors log in before they can add a comment.

To enable this option in the ‘Guestbook’ or ‘Forum’ feature, use these steps:

  1. Click on the ‘Edit Content’ tab
  2. Navigate to the page containing your 'Guestbook' or 'Forum' feature
  3. Click on the guestbook or forum to open the feature settings
  4. Select ‘Options’ on the left
  5. Toggle on ‘Require user to be signed in to post a comment’
  6. Click ‘Save’