Hi @robynie,
Thanks for the details — this makes the situation easy to diagnose.
The Content Permissions feature in Members works differently than you might expect. When you check those role boxes, it doesn’t prevent anyone from visiting the page — it only hides the written content (the post body, excerpt, and comments) from users who don’t have the selected role. Logged-out visitors can still reach the page; they just won’t see the content inside it. That’s why you’re not noticing any difference — the feature is doing its job, just not the job you were hoping for.
There’s also a WordPress quirk here: the “Posts page” you’ve set in Settings > Reading is a virtual archive generated by WordPress — it’s not a real editable page, so Content Permissions applied to it may not have any effect at all.
For what you’re actually trying to do — restrict the entire blog/posts page to logged-in users only — the Members plugin has a Private Site feature (Settings > Members > General) that makes your whole site visible only to logged-in users. That’s the closest native option.
If you only want to restrict the blog archive and leave the rest of your site public, that’s currently outside what Members handles out of the box. You’d need either a small custom code snippet (hooking into template_redirect to check is_home() and redirect non-logged-in users) or a separate plugin focused on archive-level access control.
Hope that clears things up!
Thank you so much for your prompt and clear reply! I suspected this was somehow more complex than what I was imagining and your explanation was very helpful. I will see what I can work out from here. 🙂
