Drafts in WordPress can only be seen by people who can edit them. When a client, a legal reviewer, or a colleague without an account needs to read a draft before it goes live, Share a Draft gives you a link for exactly that, and keeps you in control of it.

Open a draft, choose Generate preview link in the Share a Draft panel, and send the link to your reviewer. They see the draft exactly as it will look when published, without logging in.

Every link is:

Private. Only people with the link can open the draft. Links are kept out of search engines and page caches, and an unknown link is a plain “not found”, so nobody can go looking for drafts.
Time-limited. Choose how long the link lasts, from an hour to a week. Developers can offer other lifetimes.
Use-limited, if you want. Cap how many people can open it, down to a one-time link.
Bound to named reviewers, if you want. List reviewers’ email addresses, and each one confirms theirs with a one-time code before the draft opens, so a forwarded link is useless to anyone else.
Restricted to trusted networks, if you want. Allow only certain IP addresses or ranges, such as your office network.
Revocable. Switch off any link at any moment. A reviewer who returns to an expired or revoked link is told why it stopped working.

Links also tidy themselves up: they are discarded when a draft is published, made private, or trashed, and revoked when the person who created them is deleted.

Editors and administrators get a Preview Links screen listing every link on the site, with who created it, how often it has been used, and when it expires. From there they can revoke links in bulk (for example, everything one person made, when they leave), and administrators can pause every link at once while investigating a suspected leak, then switch them back on. See managing links for the details, including hooks for your own offboarding process.

Developers can do all of this from the shell with WP-CLI (wp shareadraft create, list, revoke, prune, disable and enable), or let AI assistants and MCP clients do it through the WordPress Abilities API, under the same rules and permissions as the editor. They can also customize how links behave, from the lifetimes on offer to what reviewers are told.

Share a Draft works on any host, with nothing to configure. On WordPress VIP it is also available as an integration, with hosting requirements already met and optional settings in the VIP Dashboard.

Upgrading from Share a Draft 1.x

Share a Draft 2.0 is a rewrite. Links made with 1.x keep working until they expire, and their owners can review and delete them under Posts Share a Draft (Old), which only appears while they have one. 1.x links cannot be extended; new links are made from the post editor. Support for 1.x links will be removed in 2.1.0.

None of 2.0’s controls apply to 1.x links. Pausing every link, trusted IP ranges, viewer limits, named reviewers, the Preview Links screen, bulk revoking, WP-CLI and the Abilities API all cover 2.0 links only, and a 1.x link keeps working even if its post is made private or trashed. Only the person who made a 1.x link can delete it, so if one leaks, ask them to delete it under Posts Share a Draft (Old).