Password protect returns 404

The page and Form are being cached and minified. Most likely cause of the problem is that you are minifying and caching the page. Website pages with Forms should never be cached. I believe you should not minify them either. The Form needs to be dynamic and not static. All caching plugins allow you to exclude pages from being cached. So just create an exclude rule in your caching plugin settings to not cache this page and probably not minify it either.

Thanks for the reply. I’m using W3 Total Cache. I don’t see anything there to exclude pages.

And, I deactivated it and I’m still having the same problem, so I don’t think that’s it.

The page is still cached and minified. You probably need to activate W3TC and delete all cached pages. Not sure what W3TC option setting or setting name that would be. To check your website page Source Code do this: Right mouse click on the page and click View Source or a similar command (menu name).

Thanks again. I found an “Empty Cache” button in the settings for W3TC and used that.

Then, went to another browser that had never viewed the test page and still got the 404.

From what I can tell looking online, there are any number of reasons this happens, but they’re very old threads. I’m hoping someone who has fixed the problem lately will come up with a new approach.

Ok the page is no longer being cached so now I can see the problem. /wp-login.php itself is not found/is a 404 error. have you done something like renamed your login page? Added something that hides your login page? done anything unusual with your login page? created a custom login page?

Yep just checked again. You have created a custom login page here /login/ so not sure if the WordPress Page/Post password protection feature has the capability to add a new login page path. Most likely you will have to change a setting in whatever plugin or theme you are using to change your login page.

Ah, yes, I’m running a membership plugin called MemberPress and it created a custom login page called, you guessed it: Login

Could that be the issue? If I rename the page to member-login or something, do you think that would fix it?

Or you could create a redirect in your root .htaccess file to redirect wp-login.php to /login/

RedirectMatch 301 ^wp-login\.php$ https://example.com/login/

We were posting at the same time. Yes. That is definitely the problem. No. You would need to tell your server/website where your new login page is. WordPress by default is wp-login.php. So you need to tell your server/website that your login page is somewhere else.

What is odd about this is that MemberPress should be doing that automatically so maybe you just need to turn off minification to fix the problem. Minification will grab original Source Code and create a new combined page from that code/scripts. It is very possible that the original code is no longer working correctly since it has been minified.

My login on the site login page is working fine. Will changing the .htaccess mess that up?

What exactly would I be doing with the redirect? Right now, I have:

Admin login
MemberPress login
Password Protect login

with that redirect, which one am I redirecting? Thanks so much for your help. This issue is a bit beyond my pay grade.

Ok forget about doing an htaccess redirect and just look at the root cause of the problem. What I recommend that you do is contact MemberPress and ask them about this. Refer them to this forum topic thread so that they can see all the details about what problem is occurring.

OK, thanks again for the help!

Yep. There are 2 primary reasons to contact MemberPress on this issue. 1. I expect that they already know about this particular issue and already have a solution. 2. The possibility that they are not aware that this issue is occurring so that they can create a permanent solution for everyone. ??

MemberPress creates a front-end Login page, but leaves the wp-login.php file as is (both work independently with no conflicts). So there must be some other factor at play here causing the 404 on the wp-login.php file. Can you paste the contents of your .htaccess file here?