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

The first thing to know is that sharing a WordPress draft link to someone who’s not logged in 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 This is a feature of WordPress, designed to keep your unpublished content properly unpublished.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. Here’s our video tutorial showing you how to use Public Post Preview to share a preview link for a post draft (of any post type—Post, Page, or a custom post type) with a person who isn’t logged in.

And here is a text guide to the same information.

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=123abc12. 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.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy selectively sharing your post drafts!