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Sharing a Preview of a 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, create many (temporary) broken links, and orphan all pages that are under that page in the website structure.

  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. 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 piece of content 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 as long as they are on campus or connected to the VPN.

More information about using public website WordPress