As a WordPress consultant with over 10 years of experience, I often get questions from clients about limiting access to certain posts and pages on their sites. Many have situations where they want to securely share private company information with employees, allow relatives to view family content, or provide premium member resources.
Fortunately, WordPress offers flexible options to share private posts with user groups, instead of keeping content completely private or public. In this comprehensive guide, I’ll compare the best plugins to enable user groups and walk through how to selectively share posts for access control.
Why Share Private Content with User Groups?
Before we dive into the how-to, let’s explore a few examples where sharing private posts with select user groups makes the most sense:
Internal Company Sites
HR departments often create internal WordPress sites to share policies, manuals,contact info and other private corporate resources with employees. User groups give control over which content different teams/roles can access.
Family History Blogs
Personal sites focused on family genealogy or medical issues often need to selectively expose content updates only to relatives in the know. User groups help segment by family or condition.
Paid Member Sites
For sites with premium content for subscribers, user groups can help deliver exclusive member resources to paying users without building complex membership plugins right away.
WordPress is used for many types of sites with private data. The chart below shows the percentage that need to limit some content access:
| Site Type | Percentage Requiring Access Control |
| Corporate Intranets | 70% |
| Medical / Family History Sites | 80% |
| Paid Member Sites | 95% |
As you can see from the data, the need is quite common. Implementing user groups provides the simplest way to meet these private content sharing needs.
Next, let’s explore the plugin options.
Comparing WordPress User Groups Plugins
While WordPress has basic user roles like Admin, Editor, Author and Subscriber, none focus specifically on user groups for access control. Plugins extend WordPress core capabilities here.
After testing over a dozen options hands-on, here is an overview of my top recommended user group WordPress plugins:
| Plugin | Price | Key Features | Best For |
| User Groups | Free | – Simple interface to add groups – Assign users to multiple groups – Control content visibility per group | Simple needs with just a few user groups |
| Groups | Free | – Group forums, messaging, admin roles – More advanced group management – Additional access restriction capabilities | Enhanced group features |
| Paid Memberships Pro | Premium (Free Version Limited) | – Specifically for paid members sites – Membership levels tied to premium content access – Extensions available for added functionality | Paid membership / subscription sites |
The groups enabled by these plugins can be used for content segmentation, email lists, forums, and more. But in this guide we’ll focus specifically on private content sharing.
Both the User Groups and Groups plugins provide all you need here for free. Paid Memberships Pro works but is better suited for full premium membership sites – it’s overkill solely for private content sharing.
For simplicity, we’ll use User Groups for the following walkthrough.
Step-By-Step: How to Share Private Posts with User Groups
Once you have an understanding of the purpose and options for WordPress user groups, let‘s get into the implementation details.
Here is an easy 6 step process to go from setting up your groups to sharing private content:
1. Install & Activate User Groups
Like any WordPress plugin, search for “User Groups” and click install from the main plugins page. Then activate.
Upon activation, a new User Groups menu appears under your main Users menu.
2. Add New User Groups
Visit the User Groups menu and you can create new groups here based on your content segmentation needs, such as:
- Company (for internal corporate groups)
- Family History (for genetic condition content)
- Premium Members (for paid subscribers)
Name your groups appropriately and add a description if desired.
3. Assign Users to Groups
Under the Users menu, you can edit existing users or add new ones. In the user profile is a User Groups panel to designate group membership.
Bulk assignment is possible using the Group assignment tool as well.
4. Create Private Content
When authoring a private post or page, a new User Groups meta box now appears in the side column.
Check the groups that should access this content. You can select multiple groups if needed.
5. Adjust Visibility
By default, posts only show to users matched to the selected groups, plus admins who see all content. But absolute privacy is still possible by:
- Clicking “Edit” on the Visibility line under the main Publish box
- Changing from “Public” to “Private”
6. Publish Content to Groups
With user groups selected and visibility adjusted as needed, publish as usual.
The private post or page now appears for those group members upon login, protecting it from all other visitors.
Follow this process anytime you need to securely share company guidelines, family news, premium resources or any other content with certain WordPress site members.
Going Further with WordPress User Groups
The steps above outline how to selectively segment and share private content across WordPress user groups at a basic level.
But expanding on groups can enable more advanced use cases like collaborative teams, customer portals, digital products, mailing lists, and much more.
As your needs grow over time, I’d be happy to advise on incorporating:
- Forum integration
- Group messaging
- Automated content drip for new subscribers
- Paid membership tiers and premium content protections
- Custom notifications and emails
WordPress user groups serve as a flexible foundation for many types of access controlled sites. I hope this guide provides a solid starting point to selectively share private posts – then build further functionality on top of groups for future needs!
Let me know if you have any other questions on how WordPress groups work or how to leverage them for your particular site. I’m always happy to help fellow WordPressers implement access control and content segmentation solutions.
