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Sharing a Temporary Preview of a Public Website WordPress Page

Have you ever been working on a draft or a revision of a page and wished you could share a preview of the page with someone who doesn’t have access to WordPress? Well, now you can!

Steps to share a public preview

In the Publish sidebar, there’s a check box to Enable public preview. It will display on any saved draft page, or any revision of a page.

  1. Open a draft new page or draft revision copy of a published page.
Page revisions

Do not turn a Published page back to a Draft page.

If the page is already published, you must create a revision of the page first.

If you turn a published page back to a draft it will remove it from the site entirely and create potentially many broken links.

  1. Save the draft, if you haven’t yet done so.
  2. Check the Enable public preview checkbox.
    Publish sidebar in WordPress with a red arrow pointing to the Enable public preview checkbox, below the revision count
  3. Right-click to copy the URL that appears.
    contextual menu that appears when you right-click the URL
  4. [Optional] If the person you are sharing the link with is likely to need to access it off campus or on a personal device, you can visit the new link and use the Toggle BCIT Website bookmarklet to transform the link into one that is available regardless of location or device.
  5. Share the URL with your recipient (you may want to warn them it’s a temporary link).

Public preview links are temporary

The link is temporary. It will expire after 48 hours. If that happens, you will need to copy and share a new link.

You can enable or disable the public preview for any draft page at any time, just by checking or unchecking the box.

Public preview links are visible but unlisted

When you create a preview link, it won’t appear in any search results within bcit.ca, nor in any search engine results. Preview pages are not password protected. Anyone who has the link will be able to view the page.

More information about public website WordPress