Is there a maximum number of passwords?
Our WooCommerce Protected Categories, WooCommerce Private Store and Password Protected Categories provide two ways to protect areas of your WordPress website:
- Password protection - customers enter a simple password to unlock the protected area(s). They do not require individual user accounts.
- User login - the protected areas automatically unlock when people log into their user account.
There is no set limit on the number of passwords that you can add to your store. We will provide more information below.
Password protection
If you are using the basic password protection that comes with the plugin, then you can create as many passwords as you like. Visitors can enter any correct password to unlock the hidden content.
However, in order to unlock the store, the plugin has to look at all the passwords in the WordPress database to find a match. We have customers who have created dozens of passwords without any problems, but if you have hundreds or thousands then it might start to slow down the password entry process.
If you find that it takes a long time to unlock the protected area after entering a password, then it may be that you have too many passwords for your server to cope with. The solution would be either to reduce the number of passwords to minimise the load on the database, or switching to one of the user-login based protection members instead of password protection.
User login
If you set up the plugin to automatically unlock the protected area for logged in users then there is no limit on the number of users you can have, and there should be no performance limitations if you have large numbers of users. This is because the plugin works with the user accounts that come with WordPress itself, and WordPress is designed to work with hundreds or thousands of users.