Sorry, but problematic!

When working on websites, I like to add a site-wide password to stop user and search engines accessing the site during that period.

I normally use another plugin for this, but it had not been updated for 6 months and on WP5.7 was causing the (known) issue of misreporting that there was an https issue with the site when doing a health check.

So I decided to go with this one. At first I thought it would do the job, but when I went to check the site health, I got into the loop of it constantly asking for user/password. I enabled the (supposed) fix for this and then tried again – but same issue.

At this point I decided to deactivate/uninstall the plugin – that did not help and the site was still asking for the password, but least at this point I could still access the site.

I reinstalled – disabled everything and removed the user thinking that would fix it – now it was even worse. I was still asked for user/pw but now it was not recognised – basically I had been locked out of the site completely.

The only fix was to ftp in, download the .htaccess file and manually remove the authentication section added by this plugin and re-upload it.

Not sure what has been left in the file structure / db, but at least I am back in and have gone back to the original plugin.

What is even worse, is that this plugin also causes the same https error when checking on site health. So it was all for nothing anyway…

Needs some more work guys!

Cheers,
Mark.

PS. If you do fix these issues and want me to give it another go – of course I will be happy to do so and will happily up the grading accordingly ??