How to Share an Unpublished Draft in WordPress Before It’s Published
Have you ever tried to share your unpublished post or page with someone?
If yes, what do you see? A blank 404 page, right?
By default, WordPress doesn’t come with a function that allows you to share your unpublished drafts who isn’t logged in to your site.
More than that, users need editor or high user level permission to see your unpublished draft post. It’s a major problem for users who want to show their work before publishing.
Fortunately, there is a plugin called “Public Post Preview”, which will allow you to share a link to anonymous users for public preview of a post or page.
In this article, I will show you how to share an unpublished draft post in WordPress before it’s published.
Why Share an Unpublished Draft in WordPress
When you are writing a blog post, you may want to share it with your friends to check if it needs to improve more.
Similarly, if you accept guest posts on your site, you can easily share a preview of an unpublished post for their approval, because they may want to add something or add an image.
In most cases, WordPress site owners create separate contributor accounts for guest bloggers who can easily write blog posts by logging in to your site.
Now think, if there you have many guest bloggers and they write low-quality blog posts and link to their own site for SEO purposes, how mess it will be.
Even, the may try to harm your site and you may not able to track them.
So, by sharing an unpublished post, you are not giving them access to your site and still, they can see your draft.
Not to mention, this way you can improve your WordPress site’s security.
So, let’s see how to use share a draft plugin in WordPress.
Read, Best plugins to monitor other users’ activity in your WordPress site
How to Share Unpublished Post in WordPress Before It’s Published
- First, download and install the Public Post Preview plugin.
- Go to Posts > All Posts and edit a post that you want to share.
- From the publish post meta box, check the Public Post Preview option
- Click on Save Draft.
- Once done, you will see “Enable public preview” option on the right side
- Copy the link and share it with anyone you want
The public post preview option will not work if you publish the article, so make sure you saved the post or page as a draft.
Now copy the link and share it with anyone you want. However, they will be able to see the unpublished draft but can’t make any edit to the post.
To disable the preview, go to edit the post or page and uncheck the Enable public preview option. This will disable the public post preview and the previously shared URL will not work anymore.
If you want to check which unpublished posts are shared publically, go to All Posts from your WordPress admin panel.
I hope this tutorial helped you to learn how to share an unpublished post or page publically in WordPress.
If you are getting an issue with it, please let us know in the comment section. If you like this tutorial, share it with your friends.
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