Sometimes it is quite useful to password protect your whole wordpress website. Maybe it contains sensitive information meant only for your team, or perhaps as a designer you don’t want to hand over the site to the client before payment, but you do need to show them how it looks so that you can get paid!
Enter a fantastic plugin by Ben Huson simply entitled Password Protected.
Essentially, once enabled, your entire site gets hidden behind a login page which asks visiting users for a password. Not for individual pages, or certain post types, or a certain section, but the whole site!
It is important to note that this plugin only protects your WordPress content, and as such it does not protect images or uploaded files – so if you enter the exact URL to in image file it will still be accessible. (In other words, this isn’t intended to prevent hot-linking of your files).
Nevertheless, pretty damn useful overall.
Install as per usual via the Admin panel, and activate. You’ll be asked to select a password and well as what types of users should be able to view the content with or without a password. As a bonus, the plugin does give you the option as to whether or not you want to password protect RSS feeds.
Nifty.
Related Link: http://wordpress.org/plugins/password-protected/