Sometimes you need a section of a live page that only you can see — a work in progress, a redesign draft or a note to self. With Restrict for Elementor you can show Elementor content to the post author only, hiding any section, column or widget from every other visitor of your website. This guide explains how the post author condition works, when it is genuinely useful and how it compares to simply saving a draft.
How to show Elementor content to the post author only
- Make sure Restrict for Elementor is installed and activated. If you are setting up the plugin for the first time, follow the quickstart guide.
- Edit the page or post with Elementor and select the section, column or widget you want to restrict.
- In the Content area of that element, select the Post author criteria.
- Choose whether the element should be shown or hidden to the post author, then save the page.
That’s all there is to it. From that moment on, the restricted element behaves according to your rule: while there is little logic in hiding content from the post you are the author of, it makes a whole lot of sense to make it visible to the author only — and that is the scenario this criteria was built for.
Why restrict content to the post author?
The most common reason is working on content that is not yet finished. You don’t want visitors to see a half-built section, but you also don’t want to take the whole page offline while you polish it.
Imagine you are preparing a content update on your home page that you are not quite ready to publish. With the post author condition, you can keep working on that new section, column or widget for as long as you need while its visibility stays restricted to you only. Visitors will see the rest of the page exactly as before — just not the part you are still working on.
Once you are finished, simply remove the restriction criteria (or set a different one, such as logged-in users or a specific user role) and the content instantly becomes visible to everyone else.
The condition is also handy on multi-author websites. Since the rule always follows the author of the current post, each writer can keep an author-only block — a to-do list for the article, reference notes or reminders — right inside the page they are working on, invisible to readers and to other visitors.
Post author restriction vs. drafts and private posts
Granted, WordPress already lets you hide unfinished work by saving a post as a draft or publishing it privately. So why use this criteria instead?
Drafts and private posts hide the entire page or post. The post author condition in Restrict for Elementor works on the element level: a single section, column or widget. That is exactly what you need when the page itself must stay live — like a home page, a landing page that is running in a campaign, or a sales page — and only one part of it is under construction.
In short: use drafts for brand-new pages, and use the post author criteria when you are updating a page that visitors are actively using.
Good to know
- The restriction works per element, so you can have several author-only blocks on the same page while everything else stays public.
- To be recognized as the post author, you need to be logged in to your WordPress account — if you check the page in a private browsing window while logged out, you will see it exactly as a regular visitor does, which is a handy way to verify the restriction.
Filling the gap with alternative content
By default, other visitors simply won’t see the restricted element. If you prefer, you can display alternative content in its place — for example, the current version of a section while the author previews the new one. See the displaying alternative content guide for the details.