How to Password Protect Admin area in Joomla

Posted on February 2nd, 2016

Joomla is an open-source content management system for web publishing and development. It is developed by Open Source Matters, Inc under the GPLv2 license. The main benefit of being open-source is, developers around the world can contribute to the development of Joomla. As a result, many developers worked on creating awesome plugins or extensions for the system. Extensions or Plugins allows to simply plug in a piece of code and use it to improve the functionality of your site.

For example, Today, we are going to see how to Password Protect Admin area of Joomla, and we will use a plugin for this task. Yes, the admin panel of Joomla is by-default password protected, but we will add one more layer of security by password protecting the login page of our Joomla site.

It means that you need a specific Username-password combination to access the login page, and then you need to correct administrator login information to access the admin panel. It is called htpasswd authentication. The process to protect the login page of your Joomla site is simple and does not require you to have any technical knowledge.

So, Let’s get started with the tutorial.

Password Protect Login Page in Joomla

First of all, log in to the admin panel of your Joomla site. Now, click on the Extensions -> Manage -> Install option to add a install a new extension. See the following screenshot for clarification.

Password Protect Joomla Login Page

On this page, you will see a note with a button to install “Add From Web” functionality to your site. If you have already installed this extension, jump to the next step.

Password Protect Joomla Admin Panel

Now, select the Install From Web tab and search for the Admin Tools extension. Once found, click on it. It will redirect you to a page from which you can install the extension, just like the following image.

Install Admin Tools in Joomla

Once installed, click on the Components -> Admin Tools option from the main menu, just as highlighted in the following screenshot.

Password protect login page Joomla

In the Admin tools section, you will find an option called “Password-protect Administrator” under the Security section. Click on it to enable basic HTTP authentication to protect the admin panel of your Joomla site.

Password Protect admin panel of Joomla

It will redirect you to a new page where you will see a form to set Username and Password. Enter the username and password you want to set and click on the Apply Password Protection button given after the form. The form should look like the following image.

Password protect admin panel of Joomla

Once set, Joomla will start asking you the username and password to access the login page. It is an excellent way to add one more layer of security to protect your Joomla site.

So, this is how you can set the basic HTTP authentication on the Joomla login page to protect the admin panel. If you have any questions regarding this tutorial or feature, please let us know in the comment section given below. We will get back to you with help as soon as possible.

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