How to Set Up Multiple Authentication for Your WordPress Site
If you are using WordPress for your website project, you are in luck because this platform provides you with dozens of free and premium plugins that can enhance the user experience on your site. One of the most popular plugins is Advanced Custom Fields, which provides you with a flexible way to add more content to your site. You can use this plugin to add various text fields to your site—such as an address field, a phone number field, and a company field—so that users can enter information into these text fields when they visit your site. For example, you can have the user’s address automatically entered into an address field when they visit your site. Or, you can have their phone number automatically entered into the phone number field when they visit your site.
You may be wondering, how does multiple authentication work? As the name suggests, multiple authentication means you are authorizing users more than once—in other words, you are providing different types of credentials (such as a username and a password) to login to your site. The benefit of this approach is that if someone tries to login with the wrong credentials, the system will prevent them from accessing your site. Moreover, the system will also notify you if someone tries to login with the wrong credentials—thus, you can take necessary action (such as suspending the user’s account) before they even have a chance to do any damage.
Fortunately, setting up multiple authentication for your site is not as difficult as you might think. In fact, you can use WordPress’s built-in features to provide different types of authentication for your site. The following steps will guide you in the right direction.
Step one: Select the right plugins
Before you start editing the code of your site, you should first examine which plugins you will need to use to achieve the desired result. Fortunately, WordPress provides you with a comprehensive list of required and recommended plugins—including multiple authentication—so that you do not have to search for them manually. You should check this list and see whether any of these plugins is already included in your WordPress installation. If so, you do not need to worry about installing them because they will be automatically available to you.
Furthermore, you should ensure that the plugins you will use comply with the WordPress standards—otherwise, you risk encountering compatibility issues when you try to use them. For example, you should avoid using the deprecated versions of plugins because the developers may stop supporting these plugins at any time. In this way, you ensure that you are always using the latest version of a plugin, which provides you with the best chance of having a fully functional site.
Step two: Configure the required options
After you have installed the required plugins, you should proceed to their respective settings pages and configure them as needed. The advantage of this step is that you can find all the necessary settings in a single place, which makes it easy to modify them later on if needed. For example, the settings page of the bcmsimple captcha plugin provides you with the ability to customize the captcha format you will use for your site. If you need to add more fields to your site (such as a city, state, or country field), you can use this option to find a suitable default value for these fields.
Step three: Modifiy the front end of your site
Now that you have configured the required settings of the selected plugins, you can proceed to their respective front-end templates and modify them as needed. Remember: you are free to modify these templates as you see fit; however, if you want to keep the original design of a plugin, you should not modify its template—you should instead download the original design and use it as a starting point for your own modification.
The advantage of this step is that you can have a fully functioning site up and running in a short amount of time. Furthermore, if you are using WordPress’s built-in HTML editor (such as WordPress’s default WYSIWYG editor), you can simply modify the templates and save them directly to your site. As a result, you do not have to go through the tedious process of manually typing the entire HTML of a template—saving you both time and energy.
Step four: Protect your back end
Once you have modified the templates of the required plugins and have saved them to your site, you should proceed to their respective settings pages and protect them with a password. Like with the front end of your site, you can modify these settings as you see fit—but, again, you should take care not to remove the password protection from these pages. If you decide to remove the password protection from one of these pages, make sure you take the time to generate a strong password and remember it. Otherwise, anyone will be able to view the contents of your site—including any data you have stored within it (such as customer details).
If you have followed these steps and have configured multiple authentication for your wordpress site, you should now have a fully functional site—provided you remember to use the right plugins and modify their templates as needed.