About this plugin
Your login page is the first screen many people see of your site, and by default it is the same grey box as everyone else’s. Latchkey lets you design it — colours, background, card, fields, button, typography, logo — and see the result on the real page while you work.
Two things make it different
The preview is the real page. php in a frame and updates it as you drag a slider. There is no second rendering path that can drift from what visitors get, so what you approve is what ships.
It never touches how logging in works. Every form stays the form WordPress rendered, posting where WordPress told it to post. No custom sign-in handling, no password processing, no session code.
That is why Latchkey keeps working next to your two-factor and security plugins instead of fighting them — and why it cannot lock you out.
Nothing is held back
There is no licence key, no trial and no setting that stops halfway. Every template, every colour, every control in this plugin works on every install.
What you can change
- Four templates to start from, every one of them fully editable
- Three arrangements: centred card, split screen, full screen
- Backgrounds: solid colour, animated gradient, aurora, mesh, or your own image
- Every colour, with no restrictions
- Card surface, opacity, glass blur, corner radius, width and padding
- Field style, height, corner radius, floating labels and icons
- Button colours, size, corner radius and hover behaviour
- Typography and logo
- Which elements appear: remember me, navigation links, back-to-site link
Built to behave
- No external requests. Nothing is loaded from a font CDN or an analytics endpoint.
- No tracking, no telemetry, no phoning home.
- One database row. Uninstalling removes it.
- Respects prefers-reduced-motion, and offers its own switch for people who want animation off regardless.
- Contrast is checked as you design, against WCAG AA and AAA.
- The interim login modal inside wp-admin is left alone, because a full-screen design would break it.
About the password strength meter
The meter is drawn by this plugin but scored by WordPress core, using the zxcvbn library that already ships with WordPress. The calculation happens entirely in the browser. This plugin reads the resulting rating, not the password: it watches the class name core writes and mirrors it onto a segmented bar.
No password value is read, stored, logged or transmitted by Latchkey.
The meter appears where WordPress creates a password — the “set a new password” screen. It never appears on the sign-in form, where showing an assessment of an existing password would tell you nothing useful.