How To Share a Post Draft in WordPress

Sometimes you want to share a draft of a WordPress post or page without requiring the person you’re sharing it with to have a login to your WordPress site. In this guide, we explain how to send a draft preview link to people who aren’t logged in.

The first thing to know is that sharing a WordPress post draft with someone who’s not logged in to your website won’t work by default. The person will just see your site’s 404 page. This is a feature of WordPress, designed to keep your unpublished content properly unpublished. So you can’t simply share your post’s draft URL (for example, https://wpshout.com/?p=18870&preview=true) out to anyone, and have it work.

The quick-and-easy solution comes in the form of a plugin: Public Post Preview.

How to Let Selected Visitors See An Unpublished Post on Your WordPress Site, Step-by-Step:

1. Install and activate the Public Post Preview plugin.
2. Go to the post (a post, a page, or any publicly viewable custom post type) that you want to share. Open its editor view (the screen that lets you add content, publish, etc.).
3. In the Post/Page settings sidebar, once you’ve saved the post as a draft (a brand-new, unsaved post doesn’t show the option yet), you’ll see a new option: “Enable public preview.” Check the box to the left of that text.
4. After you check that box, a text field will drop down with a URL inside of it. That’s your preview link. To share your draft and let the guest see it, you’ll need to copy that preview link.
5. Send the preview link to anyone you want to share the draft with. Get feedback to your heart’s content!
6. (Optional) Uncheck “Enable public preview” again to revoke access. Whether that’s worth doing depends on how sensitive the draft is: anyone holding a valid link can open it, but links also expire on their own within 48 hours by default (extendable under Settings > Reading > Public Post Preview), and publishing or trashing the post switches the preview off automatically.

One minor nerdy technical detail: what’s happening here is that the “Public Post Preview” plugin appends and relies on an extra query string: a bit at the end of the URL, which will typically look something like &_ppp=a1b2c3d4e5. To successfully provide access to the post draft, the preview link you send to people will need to include that query string. Otherwise, WordPress will behave like normal and show a 404 page.

Here’s our video tutorial showing how to use Public Post Preview to share a preview link for a draft post, page, or publicly viewable custom post type with someone who isn’t logged in. The video was published in November 2016, before the block editor arrived, so it shows the classic editor; in the block editor, the same “Enable public preview” option lives in the post’s settings sidebar, as in the steps above.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy sharing your post drafts!