Age Gate Protection

What the visitor sees instead of the photos

Age Gate Protection replaces the gallery with a short form. The visitor gets the form description, a Birthday date field and an Enter button. Nothing is hidden with CSS. The layout markup is swapped for the form before the page is sent, so the image URLs never reach the browser. A birthday under the limit answers “Your age is less than necessary.” A birthday over it sets a cookie that lasts 30 days.

The same panel carries a gallery password, and the two solve different problems. With a password you choose the audience by hand, one string given to named people. An age gate has no list. Anyone who types a date past the limit is through. Use it for work that has to be declared before it appears, and a password for work that has to stay private. Both switches can run at once, and then the visitor answers both in one form.

Defaults, limits and the cookie

The switch and its two fields sit in the Protection panel under Block settings, next to the password, right click and watermark controls.

• Age Gate Protection, off by default. Switching it on reveals the two fields below.
• Age Gate Limit, 18 by default, anywhere from 1 to 100.
• Age Gate Form Description, which reads “This gallery is age-restricted. To view it you must be over 18:” until you change it. It carries the number, so edit it when you move the limit.
• One cookie, 30 days, site wide. A password cookie covers a single gallery, the age gate cookie all of them.
• Crawlers whose user agent contains bot, crawl, slurp or spider are let past the gate. A password on the same gallery cancels that exception.
• The panel is hidden for the Social content source. Media galleries and post based grids both show it.
• Protection is part of the block settings, so a Saved Layout carries its gate to every page it appears on.

Turning the gate on in three steps

1. Insert the Visual Portfolio block and choose Media as the source. Click Add Media, pick the photos, then Select. A post based grid takes the same switch.
2. Open Block settings and expand Protection. Switch on Age Gate Protection, set Age Gate Limit to the age you need, and rewrite Age Gate Form Description so it states that number.
3. Publish, then open the page in a private window. Your own cookie hides the form for 30 days after the first pass.

The gate is Pro, the gallery is not

The layout, the skin and the lightbox above all ship in the free plugin on WordPress.org. The Protection panel is the paid piece, and the age gate lives inside it. Pro contains the free plugin, so you install one plugin either way and galleries you already built carry over. The full split is in the free versus Pro comparison, and the license tiers are on the pricing page.

• The Media and post sources, the Tiles, Masonry, Grid, Justified and Carousel layouts, the lightbox and AJAX pagination are all free.
• A license bought for the age gate also brings the password, right click blocking and watermarked images.
• Proofing galleries, taxonomy and social feed sources, AJAX search, deep linking and white label sit behind the same license.
• There is no trial. A first purchase can be refunded within 14 days.

Common age gate questions

Why does the gallery open without asking for a birthday?

Usually your own cookie. A gate you passed on this site earlier covers every age-gated gallery for 30 days. The editor preview never shows it, because the gate is a front end feature. Crawlers are let through, which is why a search result can show the photos. Check it in a private window, as the note on a gate that is not shown says.

Will an age gate keep the page out of Google?

No. User agents containing bot, crawl, slurp or spider skip the form and get the gallery, so the page is indexed like any other. Add a password to the same gallery and that exception stops applying. Yoast SEO, Rank Math and All in One SEO still put the gallery images in the XML sitemap, as the notes on galleries and search set out.

Can I translate the age gate text?

Age Gate Form Description is a block setting, not a language string, so it travels with the page like the pagination texts and the All button label. WPML has a full integration for blocks, Saved Layouts, projects and taxonomies. The plugin’s own interface strings come from a .po file in Pro, and the list of gallery texts you can translate shows where each one lives.