> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.anonage.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# WordPress
> Put an age gate on any WordPress site — free self-declaration out of the box, or a real identity-backed check.
The AnonAge plugin puts an age gate in front of your WordPress content. It works immediately with
no account, no API key and no cost, and upgrades to a real identity-backed check when you need one.
Both self-declaration modes work with no AnonAge account at all.
Nothing to configure in WP Rocket, LiteSpeed, W3TC or Cloudflare.
Gate the restricted part of a page and leave the rest indexable.
No tracking, and the QR code is generated on your own server.
## Install
Upload it to `/wp-content/plugins/`, or install it from the Plugins screen, then activate it.
Requires WordPress 6.0 and PHP 7.4 or newer.
Everything lives under **Settings → AnonAge**.
Pick how visitors prove their age, set the minimum age, and save. That is enough for a working
gate.
## The two decisions that matter
Everything else is detail. These two settings are independent, and **getting one right and not the
other achieves nothing**.
| Mode | What the visitor does | API key | Cost |
| ------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------- | ---------------- |
| **Self-declaration — confirm** | Clicks "I am over 18" | No | Free |
| **Self-declaration — year of birth** | Types their year of birth; only asked the month, and then the day, if the year alone does not settle it | No | Free |
| **Verified** | Scans a QR code with the AnonAge app, or taps through on a phone | Yes | Per verification |
Self-declaration is a statement by the visitor, not a check. It is what most sites run and it
is a reasonable default, but it is not "highly effective age assurance" under the UK Online
Safety Act or its equivalents. Verified mode is.
| Level | What leaves your server | Indexable | Cache setup |
| ------------------------------------------ | ----------------------- | --------------------- | ------------- |
| **Cover the page** | Everything | Yes | None |
| **Hide the restricted part** (recommended) | The public part only | Yes, above the marker | None |
| **Withhold the whole page** | Nothing but the gate | No | CDN rule only |
**Cover** draws the gate over the content in the browser. The content was still delivered, so
it can be recovered with developer tools — or by turning JavaScript off, which stops the
overlay existing at all. It is a courtesy notice, not a lock, and the plugin says so.
**Hide the restricted part** is the recommended setting and what the rest of this page assumes.
Choosing **Verified** with **Cover the page** means paying for a real identity check and then
protecting the content with an overlay a visitor removes in one click. The plugin warns you when
you save that combination. It is allowed — some sites want the check without hard gating — but it
does not enforce anything.
## Settings
### Choosing what to gate
Every page. Simple, and the right answer for a site that is entirely age-restricted — but in
"Withhold the whole page" mode it also means search engines see nothing but the gate on every
URL.
Tick the pages to gate. The picker shows your page hierarchy, and **ticking a parent covers all
of its children** — child pages are marked "gated via parent" so you can see what is covered
without having to work it out. Add posts or other post types by ID.
Inheritance follows the page hierarchy rather than the URL, so it still works on sites whose
permalinks are not hierarchical.
One path per line. A path ending in a slash covers everything beneath it, so `/gated/` gates
that page and every child page under it. `*` works as a wildcard.
```
/gated/
/shop/spirits/
/reviews/*-18-*
```
Everything you do not list stays open and indexable.
### Minimum age
Only **13, 16, 18 and 21** are offered. These are the thresholds the AnonAge API supports, and
keeping self-declaration on the same list means switching to verified mode later never quietly
changes the age you enforce.
### How long a visitor stays through
Session-only, 1 hour, 24 hours (default), 7 days or 30 days.
Do not set this meanly. In verified mode every re-check spends one of the **visitor's own** monthly
verifications, so a 30-minute window would exhaust an entry-tier account in a day. Anything longer
than 24 hours is flagged in the settings, because some jurisdictions expect a check per session.
### Appearance and content
The background image is shown to **everyone who has not passed the gate** — including minors and
search engines. Suggest what the site is with branding or atmosphere, but keep the image itself
suitable for all audiences.
**Leave the administrator bypass on.** A gate covering the editor while you are configuring it is
the single most common cause of "the plugin broke my site".
## Splitting a page
In "Hide the restricted part" mode, you decide where each page is cut. Put your descriptive,
keyword-carrying content above the marker and the restricted material below it.
Use the **`[anonage_gate]`** shortcode, or WordPress's own **More** block.
Without a marker the whole of the page content is withheld and only the title and excerpt remain
public — which is fine, but it wastes the page's SEO value.
## What the visitor sees
## Does it actually withhold the content?
Yes — and it is worth proving rather than asserting, because most age-gate plugins only cover the
page.
Here is a gated page with developer tools open. The entire `` is the site chrome and the
gate. The page content is not in the document at all:
And here is the same page with `position: fixed` unticked — the trick that defeats a cover-only
gate. The overlay drops away, and what is underneath is the public teaser and a notice. The
restricted content is still not there:
The restricted half is released only after the server verifies a signed cookie in PHP. Nothing the
browser can be persuaded to do changes that.
## Search engines
There is no way to withhold content from visitors and still have that content indexed. Serving
search engines something visitors do not get is **cloaking**, and it is penalised. This plugin does
not do it.
What you can choose is granularity:
Title, description and everything above the marker stay indexable and do the SEO work. Only the
restricted part is withheld.
Gate `/gated/` or a set of pages, and keep landing, category and information pages open so the
site stays findable.
"Withhold the whole page" does hide those URLs from search results, because the crawler receives
the gate and nothing else. Use it only where there is nothing safe to show.
## Caching
Nothing to configure. The page sent to every visitor is byte-identical: the gate is applied in
the browser, and the restricted content is fetched separately over a request that is never
cached.
Do **not** add the `anonage_verified` cookie to a "vary the cache on this cookie" list. It
would fragment your cache for no benefit.
This decision has to be made per visitor, so PHP has to run — and on a full-page cache hit it
does not. The plugin therefore marks every gated page as uncacheable, which **WP Rocket, W3
Total Cache, WP Super Cache and LiteSpeed** all honour automatically. The settings screen names
any it detects on your site.
A CDN in front of your site, **Cloudflare included**, needs its own rule to bypass the cache on
those URLs. Without it a cached copy of the real page can be served to everyone.
## Membership sites
For a logged-in visitor the result is recorded against their **account**, not just their browser,
so they verify once rather than once per device.
```php theme={null}
/**
* Fires when a logged-in member clears the age gate.
*
* @param int $user_id User ID.
* @param int $age Age threshold cleared (13|16|18|21).
* @param string $mode 'self_declare' or 'verified'.
*/
add_action( 'anonage_member_verified', function ( $user_id, $age, $mode ) {
// Your own record-keeping.
}, 10, 3 );
```
The state lives in user meta as `_anonage_verified_until`, `_anonage_verified_age` and
`_anonage_verified_mode`. Delete those three keys to require a member to verify again.
## Verified mode
Verified mode checks the visitor's age against a real identity check. They scan a QR code with the
free AnonAge app and your site receives a yes or no — never their name, their date of birth or
their documents.
In the [Dashboard](https://anonage.io/console/keys) → **API Keys**, create a key. The **secret
key** and its **signing secret** are shown once — copy both.
The environment badge confirms whether it is a test or live key. The signing secret is what
proves a result genuinely came from AnonAge; without it every verification is rejected.
Shown on the same tab. AnonAge posts each signed result there.
On the Gate tab. Pair it with "Hide the restricted part" or "Withhold the whole page".
### How it works
```
visitor your site (PHP) AnonAge API
│ │ │
│ click Verify │ │
│───────────────►│ POST /api/age-verification/session
│ │ X-API-Key + callback_url + age │
│ │─────────────────────────────────►│
│ │◄──── { session_id, nonce } ──────│
│◄── QR payload ─│ (no key, no callback URL) │
│ │ │
│ (wallet scans and presents) │
│ │◄─── signed callback POST ────────│
│ │ verify X-AnonAge-Signature │
│ poll status │ │
│───────────────►│ │
│◄── approved ───│ set signed cookie │
```
The session is opened server-side. The QR code carries only `{ v, session_id, nonce, api_base }`
— an opaque reference that is useless to anyone but the wallet presenting it.
The callback carries `X-AnonAge-Signature: t=…,v1=…`, an HMAC-SHA256 over
`.`. The plugin verifies it against the **raw** request body and rejects
anything outside a five-minute window. See [Webhooks](/webhooks) for the scheme.
Plenty of sites sit behind a firewall, on a staging domain or on localhost and will never
receive an inbound callback. If none arrives within about eight seconds the plugin asks AnonAge
for the result instead, up to three times. The callback is the fast path; polling is the
reliable one.
That is the handshake window, fixed server-side — not the same thing as how long a visitor
stays through the gate. The gate shows a countdown and offers a fresh code rather than leaving
a dead QR on screen.
Opening one per pageview would spend a verification for every visitor and every crawler. There
is also a per-visitor rate limit, adjustable with the `anonage_session_rate_limit` filter.
### Requirements
**Your site must be served over HTTPS.** AnonAge refuses a plaintext callback URL in production.
On a local or staging install, put it behind a tunnel such as ngrok or Cloudflare Tunnel — the
settings screen tells you when this is the problem rather than reporting a generic failure.
## Reference
### Shortcode
| | |
| ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------- |
| `[anonage_gate]` | Marks the split point. Everything after it is withheld. |
### Filters and actions
| Hook | Type | Purpose |
| ----------------------------- | ------ | ------------------------------------------------------ |
| `anonage_should_gate` | filter | Override the gating decision for the current request. |
| `anonage_session_rate_limit` | filter | Sessions allowed per visitor per window. Default `10`. |
| `anonage_session_rate_window` | filter | The window, in seconds. Default `600`. |
| `anonage_member_verified` | action | A logged-in member cleared the gate. |
```php theme={null}
// Never gate a specific landing page, whatever the settings say.
add_filter( 'anonage_should_gate', function ( $should_gate ) {
return is_page( 'welcome' ) ? false : $should_gate;
} );
```
### What is stored
| | |
| ------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `anonage_verified` cookie | The age threshold cleared, and when it expires. Signed with your site's own key (`wp_salt`) so it cannot be forged. |
| `_anonage_verified_*` user meta | The same, for logged-in members. |
No personal data, no analytics, no tracking. The self-declaration modes make no external requests
at all.
The cookie is deliberately readable by JavaScript. The gate has to decide whether to cover the page
before it paints, and it cannot ask the server without defeating full-page caching. The signature
is what prevents forgery — and the claim itself is one the visitor made about themselves.
## Troubleshooting
Administrators are exempt by default. Open the site in a private window, or turn off the
administrator bypass on the Advanced tab.
Your site is not on HTTPS. Verified mode needs an `https://` callback URL.
The key was truncated when copied, or it has been revoked. Create a new one — note that this
also gives you a new signing secret, which must be updated too.
Check the signing secret is present on the Connection tab. Without it every result is rejected
as unsigned. Turn on debug logging on the Advanced tab to see rejections in the PHP error log.
A page cache is serving mixed copies. This should not happen with the plugin's own modes, but
it will if something else on the site varies the HTML by visitor. Do not add the
`anonage_verified` cookie to a cache-vary list.
## Questions
Email [support@anonage.io](mailto:support@anonage.io).