How To Add Age Verification To WordPress Site
Do you want to add age verification to your WordPress site? As a website owner, one issue you might face is the inability to control who can access your site or service. This could leave your website susceptible to child endangerment policy violations.
Age restriction may not be required in your country. However, it is advisable to still have it on your website for the countries that require it.
This is especially true if your website carries content that should not be available to certain age groups. If you are in this boat, you can use an age verification system to control access to your content and services.
Content:
What is Age Verification?
Age verification is a means of validating visitors’ or users’ age before they access a product or service. The users are granted or denied access based on their age.
Before visitors can legally access content meant for adults, the websites usually ask for the age of the user. This helps to restrict underage users from visiting the site.
In this article, we will go through steps on how to set up age verification on your WordPress site.
How to Set Up WordPress Age Verification
Setting up age verification on your WordPress websites is quite easy. There are several age check plugins available to help you and you don’t need to write any code.
Using Age Gate Plugin
Trending as one of the top free plugins for WordPress age verification, the Age Gate plugin aims to help you add age restriction to your WordPress site easily. With the Age Gate plugin, you can set yes/no buttons for age verification. If you have an ecommerce store, it can also be used to restrict WooCommerce products.
To start, you will need to install the plugin on your WordPress site and then activate the plugin. Here’s how:
Firstly, from your Dashboard go to Plugins >> Add New.
On the Add New page, search for Age Gate.
In the result list, you will need to click on the Install Now button.
Now wait for a couple of seconds for the installation to complete, and then click on Activate.
After activating the plugin, you will need to configure it to match your preference. From the Plugins page, click on the “Settings” section of the Age Gate plugin.
Side Note: You can also access the plugin settings page from your Dashboard by going to Age Gate >> Advanced.
On the Settings page, go to the “Restriction settings”. In this section, you customize the age limit you require, where to show the restriction, etc.
For our example, we will set the “Default age” (the minimum age that can access the content) to 18, content restriction to “All content”, “Validate age using” to Yes/No and leave the rest as default.
Then click on the Save Changes button to save our preferences.
More customization options can be configured but for this article, that is all we need. Now when users visit your WordPress site, they will be shown this page and it will require confirming their age before they can be allowed to view the contents.
Having the default age verification message is sufficient in many cases. However, you can customize the age verification screen to make it look more appealing. As we said earlier, customizing the Age Gate plugin is extremely easy and we will get right on it.
Customizing the WordPress Age Verification Screen
On your Age Gate plugin page, select the “Messaging” section. In this section, we will customize the “Headline” and “Sub headline”.
After making changes to the headline and subheadline, click the Save Changes button.
Now users visiting the site will be shown the restriction, which they have to accept before they can continue.
Customizing the Appearance – WordPress Age Verification
Next, we will configure the “Appearance” to make the page harmonize with the site branding. In the “Appearance” section, we can configure the background color and opacity, add images and transitions, etc.
For our example, we will add a logo, add a background image, adjust the background-position, and change the transition.
After making the edits, click on the Save Changes button to save your preferences.
Et voila!. The restriction screen looks very customized and it conveys the message we are trying to send!
Using Agy – Age Verification for WooCommerce
Agy – Age Verification for WooCommerce is another WordPress age verification plugin that was created with WooCommerce built-in support. It provides options to restrict products and pages to a specific age.
Note that this plugin requires WooCommerce to run. If you do not have WooCommerce installed and you don’t want to use WooCommerce on your WordPress site, then you should use the Age Gate plugin instead.
Let’s install and activate the plugin.
From your Dashboard go to Plugins >> Add New.
Search for “Agy” and click on the Install Now button when it appears.
Once it is done installing, click on the Activate button.
On the next page, Agy will prompt you to allow automatic updates, we will click on Allow & Continue.
At this point, visitors to the site will be greeted with this page:
What we want to do now is customize it so that we can hide the content better and change the text, colors, etc.
Customizing the Agy – Age Verification WooCommerce Plugin
Customizing the Agy plugin is quite straightforward.
From your Dashboard page, go to WooCommerce >> Agy page.
First, go to the “General” section. Here, you can change the “Exit URL” for any user that clicks on Exit when the age verification popup shows. In this example, we will set it to the link to a page called Minors that we have created for this purpose. After entering your exit URL, save the changes.
In the “Text” section, you can leave the text options in their default values.
Finally, in the “Design” section, you can add the background image and leave the rest as defaults and save changes.
With all these settings in place, this is how the restriction looks like.
More WooCommerce options require Agy Pro, but the basic configuration is good enough for our example.
Disabling WordPress Age Verification for Specific Pages
Agy – Age Verification for WooCommerce also offers the option to disable the plugin for specific pages and posts. This comes in handy if you do not want your entire site to require age verification, which is often the case.
In this example, we will disable the plugin for the ‘Minors’ page since we set it up earlier to be the exit page.
In your Dashboard, go to Pages >> All Pages.
Click on the “Minors” page to open it in the editor.
In the Gutenberg editor, under the “Agy Display options” section, enable the “Deactivate Age Verification for this content” option and click on the Update button.
With all the configurations set, whenever a user visits your website and clicks on Exit, they will be redirected to the Minors page.
And that is all you need to install and configure Agy Plugin on your WordPress/WooCommerce site. Other customization options become available once you purchase the premium version, including limiting products to a certain age.
Other Age Verification Plugins for WordPress
Additional plugins for Age Verification purposes include:
- Dispensary Age Verification
- Age Checker for WordPress
- Age Verifier for WordPress
- Elfsight’s Age Verification
Conclusion
Having age restrictions on your website will help you guide users to the right pages and avoid unnecessary legal issues relating to underage users. And as we have seen in this guide, setting up age verification does not require custom coding or a complex setup.
We hope this article has been able to help you figure out the way to configure age verification on your WordPress site. If you use another method we did not cover, please let us know in the comments below.
Also, drop a comment or give a thumbs up if this helped you or you’ve learned a thing or two. Do check below some of our articles.
