Hi @gamicord
I hope you’re well today!
In “Defender” you have a “Masked Login Area” feature but it’s for a slightly different purpose. It’s not meant to set redirect from default to custom login but rather actually hide and disallow standard login.
So if we forget for a second that you already have custom login on site, what you would do would be:
– go to “Defender -> Tools -> Mask Login Area” page and activate the feature
– then in “Masking URL Slug” you put some slug name (or “URL slug”) – that DOES NOT EXIST on the page – which would be your new login page.
For example, let’s say I want my login to be at “site.com/garage”; I make sure that “garage” page doesn’t exist on site and I set “garage” as “Masking URL Slug”.
At this point if I’ll go to “site.com/wp-admin” or “site.com/wp-login.php”, I’m greeted with error message and I need to actually know that login is at “site.com/garage”.
But then
– I can also enable “Redirect traffic” option and either select any existing page to redirect users to or set custom URL.
And with this set, if I go to “site.com/wp-admin” or “site.com/wp-login.php” I will be redirected to that page/URL. The point here is to not set redirect to my masked “site.com/garage” URL as it would defy the purpose of the feature.
But what you can try is to set it like this and in redirect set select your new custom front-end login page, while setting “Masked URL slug” to something complex and “hard to guess”.
However, please note that “Mask Login Area” feature does attempt to detect if a given page is a login page so depending on how your custom login page works, it may also block it. It’s not a rule so you would need to test it first (if it blocks it, you can still login by via that “Masking URL slug” URL and undo the changes).
Or you can set that redirect to point to some other custom page and just make sure that the some login button pointing to your custom page is there (e.g. in main menu). This way whoever – including bots – would attempt to go to standard login would be bounced back to some regular page. And if they’d want to login they’d just need to click on your “login” button and be taken to your custom login page – that would be the safest solution in this case.
Kind regards,
Adam
