Recently, I received a sponsored post campaign where the client wanted to see the preview of the post before it becomes live. He already reviewed the draft but wanted to check how it would look on the live URL. That means I needed to send him the preview URL of the draft. But it is not possible for a user to see the preview URL until he is logged in with an account having privileges to access the post. Giving access to my posts just for a preview was also not a wise move. This is not just a single case. There are lots of people facing the same issue daily. So, I decided to share the solution.

If you share the preview URL with any other person who is not logged into your site will only see the 404 page. So, don’t try this one. WordPress also doesn’t offer any option of sharing the preview URL. But thank’s to the wide community of WordPress developers, there is a plugin for doing this.

There is a WordPress Plugin called “Public Post Preview“. This plugin lets you share the preview link of a post draft with a person who isn’t logged in. Good thing is that the plugin supports just post types as well.

Share a preview link of an Unpublished Post with anyone

Step 1: Install the Public Post Preview plugin on your WordPress blog and activate it.

Step 2: Now go to the post-draft that you want to share in the editor view. Make sure that the post is still a draft.

Step 3: Now see the right sidebar and find the checkbox saying “Enable Public Preview”. Select the checkbox and you will get a preview URL.

Step 4: Copy this link and send it to the person with whom you want to share the preview of the blog post before it becomes live.

Step 5: After the other person has reviewed the blog post, you can uncheck the checkbox to stop the preview if you don’t want long-term sharing.

This plugin uses WordPress’ built-in nonce functionality to expire links after 48 hours. If you want to configure this and change the expiration time, you can do that by adding a code to the theme’s functions.php file.

Here is a code snippet that will increase the ppp_nonce_life to 7 days. You can adjust the time as per your need.

add_filter( 'ppp_nonce_life', 'custom_nonce_life' );
function custom_nonce_life() {
    return 60 * 60 * 24 * 7; // for 7 days
}

Now you can publish the post at a scheduled time you are your client agreed. This plugin solves a pain most bloggers face daily. A person who is not a pro in WordPress doesn’t know that the solution exists.

I have written lots of useful WordPress articles that you shouldn’t miss if you really want to learn WordPress. You can explore more articles on UseThisTip for awesome WordPress tutorials.