Sometimes when we create websites for our clients we design pages which aren’t yet ready to be revealed to the world. Maybe the content isn’t quite finished or an announcement needs to be made at a later date? Whatever the reason it’s both quick and easy to get your unpublished pages online, here’s how…

Step 1: Login to your website

Login to your WordPress dashboard.

Step 2: Locate your unpublished page

In the sidebar menu click on ‘Pages’ and then find the page you’d like to publish. Click on the page name to open it up to edit it.

Step 3: Publish your page

At this point we’ll assume that any editing, updates or changes to the page have already been done and you are ready to launch.

This next step varies slightly depending on whether your page is saved as a draft or as privately published.

Generally, we save pages as a draft if the content on them is incomplete and needs revising. We’ll tend to save a page as private if it’s ready to launch but we don’t want to launch it just yet. Regardless, both draft and private pages do not allow visitors or search engines to view the page.

If your page is saved as a draft:

In the ‘Publish’ panel click on the ‘Publish’ button. Your page will be immediately viewable by your visitors with one caveat: they have to find it first! More on this in a moment…

If your page is privately published:

You’ll know if your page is privately published by looking in the ‘Publish’ panel. There, next to ‘status’ it will say ‘Privately Published’.

To make the page public we have to click on the link that says ‘edit’ next to Visibility in the Publish panel.

Change the status to ‘Public’ then click on the ‘OK’ button. Finally, click on the ‘Update’ button to make the page live.

Again, we’re not quite done yet as even though the page can be viewed by your visitors they won’t know where to find it.

Step 4: Add the page to your website menu

To help people find your new webpage you could add it to your main menu (if this is appropriate). Alternatively you could link to the page from a button or text link on another page. Another option is to not link to the page anywhere on your website and allow people to only find it via search engines, although this isn’t recommended for crucial pages.

How to add pages to your Divi main menu.