I am Huu Thinh – the founder and lead developer of Password Protect WP (PPWP Pro) – the most trustworthy and flexible password protection plugin for WordPress. I was born and raised in the peaceful imperial Hue city on the central coast of Vietnam.
After spending 10 years in Singapore learning and working, at the end of 2018, I went back to my motherland. Now, I’m living in Danang, Vietnam.
The Journey Began
Known about WordPress since I was a very young age, the flexibility of such an open-source software did get me to indulge at the first sight. Since then, I have always dreamt of developing a WordPress product on my own.
Not until 2015 did I seriously get involved in WordPress. While working as a site manager for a marketing company in Singapore, I spotted lots of private files of my company showing up on SERPs.
Understanding the threat of piracy to online marketers and small business owners, my friends, also WordPress enthusiasts, and I came up with the idea of building a WordPress plugin to secure digital products.
Prevent Direct Access (PDA) – our first plugin was brought to life for that reason. After 2 months of working around the clock, the first and free version of PDA was finally housed on wordpress.org. We then released the PDA Gold version in 2016.
The Need for Password Protect WP
Password Protect WP Logo
WordPress site owners are paying extra attention to securing their site and content. We’d love to develop PPWP Pro as a game-changer in this niche, using the password protection method.
The plugin must be simple to use yet robust. Plus, it can work alongside our PDA Gold plugin to completely secure WordPress content.
We notice that other plugins just mainly focus on protecting specific areas of WordPress, such as pages and posts, or partial or entire WordPress sites. This urges us to develop PPWP Pro as an all-in-one solution. In particular, creating unlimited strong and customizable passwords is a must.
The plugin gives you the flexibility to lock any WordPress content of your choice, including content sections, multiple pages of any post type, or your entire WordPress site with just a few clicks.
What’s more, PPWP Pro protects custom fields, custom page templates, parent-child, and categories. It gives you the power to control protected content visibility with ease.
But its striking features don’t just stop at that:
- Master Password: unlock all private content at the same time with master passwords
- Quick Access Link: generate access links allowing users to view private content directly without having to enter passwords
- Password Usage Tracking: see who visits the private content, when and from where they access it, as well as how many times a specific password is used.
- Password Form Customization: integrate well with WordPress Customizer, allow styling of your password forms without hassles
- Search Indexing Prevention: block search engines from indexing your password-protected content
- Page Builder Integration: Seamlessly integrate with top page builders, namely Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, WP Bakery, Visual Composer
- Caching Integration: work well with popular WordPress caching plugins, including WP Fastest Cache, WP Super Cache, and W3 Total Cache
Besides, we also have these premium PPWP Pro extensions:
- WooCommerce Integration
- Password Statistics
- Password Suite
- Access Levels
- Group Protection
- Smart Restriction
- Form Integration
- Multisite Integration
- ActiveCampaign and MailChimp Integration
On top of that, we have been trying our best to constantly improve our UI to make it as intuitive as possible.
To me and my team, building PPWP Pro is such a challenging yet fruitful journey. In the beginning, we housed PDA Gold and PPWP Pro together on 1 website. Creating a separate site for PPWP means we have to start everything from scratch.
At that time, humans played the top concern. Our little team with 6 members had been working up to our ears to develop plugin features, build blog content, do homepage design, customer services, testimonials, and optimize SEO to make it rank on SERPs.
Now, our team has grown to 20 members. We’re so proud that our plugins have eased the workload for thousands of WordPress users from pole to pole.
Password Protect WP Women Day
Some of our popular products include:
Myself with my Brilliant Team
Team Password Protect WP
Advice for Business Owners
If you want to start your own business, just do it, don’t hesitate, since opportunities can slip through our fingers in just a wink of an eye. The pandemic has taught me that lesson.
Plus, most business runners tend to put their hearts and souls into developing products, show off their hard skills but forget about marketing.
Let’s say, you’re a developer having considerable expertise in coding. You can make ten, hundreds of excellent plugins. But who’s gonna know about your plugins and purchase them, if you don’t know how to market them properly?
It’s really hard, if not almost impossible, to get your business off the ground without online marketing. So Products and Marketing, shouldn’t have one outweigh the other. They both must share equal percentages in your focus.
Stay in Touch
WordPress & Beyond
Aside from striving to improve the UI and features of PDA Gold and PPWP Pro, we’ve currently worked on these 2 projects:
- Build Profaceoff.com as a resourceful hub for WordPress and eCommerce novices. The site is jam-packed with how-to guides, tips, reviews, and well-researched statistics.
- Create a digital signature app letting users swiftly sign, export, and save their E-signs.
WordPress is fantastic and it will always be. I’m really confident in the future of WordPress in the next 5 or 10 years or even more.
WordPress stands out with a great UI and a strong, dynamic, and supportive community. This helps the platform survive and even outshine other old neighbors like Joomla or Drupal.
Besides, the open-source nature is also another key point in helping WordPress win the edge over other site builders, such as Shopify or Wix.
Of course, cloud services like Wix, Weebly, Webflow, and Shopify have kick-started lots of campaigns to get WordPress market share. This requires the platform to constantly evolve and release more new outstanding features.
My Love for the WordPress Community
The most recent WordCamp I attended was the WordCamp Santa Clarita via streaming online. The speech of Rian Rietveld about web accessibility did impress me.
I’m also a secret admirer of Sebastiaan van der Lans – the founder of WordProof and Adam Connel from Blogging Wizard.
How I Keep Myself Updated
I keep myself updated by checking out these sites:
Also, digging into Seth Godin’s blog is my sweet treat before bed.
I Have a Life Other Than the Work
I love to travel when I’m away from work. That’s the time I can reset myself. Quite sad but it’s been a while since the last time I traveled due to the outbreak of covid-19.
The trip to Manchester, UK was my best trip so far, partly because I’m a huge fan of Manchester United. Not sure if I can say this here but I was over the moon to see Ronaldo back at MU! That was such a big “yay” to me! Yayyyyyy!
Oh, I’ve never revealed this to anyone else but I am really into motorcycles. Harvey Davidson is my all-time favorite brand.
I Reward Myself by
Having good coffee and a cozy meal with my girlfriend and my lovely team is usually how I put my hair down. And of course, travel to new destinations. Africa will be the next place I’d love to mark complete on my bucket list.
2 comments
Stef
Huh? Security apps that protect and hide files have been around for years for WP users. He didn’t create anything new. WTH?
Vishwajeet Kumar
WordPress is no doubt one of the best and most secure blogging platforms. However, spammers make some loopholes to invade a site using malicious techniques. Protecting your WordPress password is a crucial thing. Password Protect WP is a great and reliable plugin to secure your WordPress. Thanks for sharing this amazing plugin and the story of its founder.
Regards,
Vishwajeet Kumar