Restricting Gutenberg Blocks in the Block Editor

The premium version of Restrict for WordPress brings content restriction directly into the block editor (Gutenberg). Every block on your page gets a Restrict panel, and a dedicated Restricted Content block lets you protect whole groups of blocks at once — using the exact same criteria you already know from the rest of the plugin.

Restricting any block

  1. While editing any post or page in the block editor, select the block you want to restrict — a paragraph, image, button, group, anything.
  2. In the block settings sidebar, open the Restrict panel.
  3. Choose the criteria in the Content available to dropdown. The available criteria include: everyone, logged in users, logged out visitors, users with a specific role or capability, the post author, visitors arriving with a URL parameter, visitors arriving from a specific website (referrer), visitors with a specific cookie — and, when the corresponding plugins are active, Tickera, Venuera, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads purchase-based criteria.
  4. Depending on the selected criteria, additional fields will appear (i.e. role selection, a product or ticket type selection, a parameter name and value).

Blocks that the visitor is not allowed to see are simply not rendered on the frontend — the content is never sent to the browser, so it cannot be revealed by viewing the page source.

Showing a restriction message

By default, a restricted block is hidden without a trace. If you would rather tell the visitor that there is something they are missing, enable the Show restriction message toggle in the Restrict panel. The message configured in the plugin settings for the selected criteria will be displayed in place of the block. You can also override it for each individual block using the Custom message field.

The Restricted Content block

When you want to protect several blocks at once, wrap them in the Restricted Content block:

  1. Add the Restricted Content block to your page (search for “restricted” in the block inserter).
  2. Place any number of blocks inside it.
  3. Set the criteria once, in the block’s Restrict panel — it applies to everything inside.

Inside the editor, the Restricted Content block is outlined with a dashed border and a small lock badge, so you can always tell at a glance which parts of the page are protected. Restricted individual blocks are marked with a dashed outline as well.

Good to know

  • Administrators (or users with a capability defined by the rsc_allowed_to_admins_capability filter) always see the restricted content.
  • Block restrictions work independently from the whole-page restriction — you can combine both on the same page.
  • The visitor-based criteria (URL parameter, referrer, cookie) are evaluated on each visit, which makes the blocks a great fit for landing page personalization.

Related documentation