Every post is one of four things, and the choice is made in the Access box in the post editor sidebar.
| Choice | Who can read the body |
|---|---|
| Site default | Whatever OwlDraft → Membership → Access is set to. Not a fourth state — it stores nothing, so the post follows the default if the default later changes. |
| Public | Anyone. |
| Members | Any signed-in reader, free or paying. |
| Paid | Paying members only. Comped readers count as paying. |
| Specific tiers | Only the tiers you tick. Appears once you have at least one paid tier. |
A publication that sells everything sets the default to Paid once and never opens the box again. A publication that sells the occasional piece leaves the default on Public and marks that piece.
Specific tiers is a set, not a ladder
Ticking Insider does not also let Founding member in. There is no above and below — each tier is its own door, and you tick every one that should open. Ticking nothing falls back to all paying members.
Withdrawn tiers keep showing in the box for a post that was limited to one. Their members are still standing on it.
What a locked reader sees
The body is cut to the teaser, and the lock replaces the rest.
The teaser is the content before a Read more block, or <!--more--> in the classic editor. Failing that, it is the hand-written excerpt. There is no fall back to an automatic excerpt, deliberately: WordPress would build one out of the first fifty-five words of the body, which on a locked post is fifty-five words of the thing the reader has not paid for. A post with neither a divider nor an excerpt shows the lock and nothing else.
So: put a Read more block after your first two or three paragraphs. That is the part of the job that is yours.
The lock itself — the heading, the line of explanation and the subscribe button — is a template, and a theme can replace it. See running your own theme.
Where the lock is enforced
Reading a post is not one code path, and a paywall that guards only the first leaks the other three. All four are covered:
| The post page | The body is cut before any theme sees it, so no theme can leak a post by getting its markup wrong. |
| Feeds | A restricted post is denied outright. An RSS reader is a stranger. |
| The REST API | content.rendered is stripped for anyone who cannot read it. This is the one most often missed elsewhere — it publishes the whole archive to anybody who can type /wp-json/. |
| Archives and search | Excerpts are fine — that is the teaser — and search still finds the post. Only the body is locked. |
Administrators and editors pass everything. Anyone who can edit a post can already read it in wp-admin, so gating them on the front end protects nothing.
What it does to search traffic
A locked post is still a page: it has its title, its teaser, its structured data and its place in your archives and sitemaps. Google sees an article with a preview, which is what every paywalled publication serves.
If search is what pays your bills, use previews rather than a bare lock — which in practice means writing a real teaser and putting the Read more block further down.
Reading the posts list
Posts → All Posts says who each post is for without your opening it: a badge beside the title, and a tint across the row. The odd one out is the coloured one. See the posts list.
Next: email a post to subscribers.