Password protecting your site – HelpKit

HelpKit enables you to password protect your knowledge base so only members have access to your content. Let’s look first look at login flow in perspective of a user and then learn how to easy it is to setup.

User login flow

Let’s have a look at the login flow for accessing a password protected site created with HelpKit and hosted on the fictional custom domain: docs.yourdomain.com

On the first page visit of your main site docs.yourdomain.com or any article site your user will be redirected to the access page docs.yourdomain.com /access. The page looks like this:

After successfully entering the password the user will be granted access to the site:

That’s it! HelpKit will keep the user logged-in until the user click the logout button in the footer or 7 days have been past.

Enabling and setting up the password protection

Let’s learn how easy it is to setup password protection from your HelpKit dashboard.

Navigate to Settings/Protected Access and select Password:

Next, choose a secure password. You can toggle the visibility of your input with the 👀 button on the right.

Hit the Save Settings button.

That’s it! Your site is now password protected and your users are required to enter it in order to access the page. The password access page looks like this:

Security of the password protection feature

Due to the fact that HelpKit works by grabbing your public Notion link we advise you to not password protect extremely sensitive and confidential data as theoretically the Notion link would be publically available. Is this an issue for my company?

If you are selling digital products and access to closed content this should definitely not be an issue as the public Notion url is almost impossible to guess. For example, our URL looks something like https://glossy-hexagon.../HelpKit-KnowledgeBase-294085AWSAF23409 As you can see it is very hard to guess that link, if not impossible 😉

If you are planning to host content that is highly sensitive such as personal/employee data, medical records or confidential information we would advise you to be a little cautious. Please reach out to us if you are unsure. We are always happy to help and provide more information!

Disabling search engine indexing from Notion

We highly recommend you to leave the Search engine indexing toggle unchecked as your Notion site would otherwise get picked up by search engines such as Google. It is disabled by default so you don’t have to necessarily worry about it.

Disabling search engine indexing from HelpKit

By default your HelpKit site is setup so that search engines are allowed to crawl your site. Given the site is protected by the access page it is highly unlikely for a search engine to crawl the site and even if users won’t be able to access the content anyway. For good measure you can disable the search engine listing from your SEO settings as well.

Sharing your password with your audience

After you have setup your password protected knowledge base you'll want to share your password with your users so they can access the site. You can always come back and change the password if you'd like. For a paid product we can recommend to use Lemonsqueezy or Gumroad for handling the payment and password distribution. Alternatively you could share the password over email or DMs.

Other access protection options

In addition to password protection, HelpKit also offers other options such as restricting access via an email list directly from Notion and more. Make sure to check them out in our Protected Access help center category.

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The password protection feature prevents access to the entire knowledge base site. Protecting individual categories separately is currently not possible.