What is a Draft in WordPress?

A page, post, or custom post type typically starts as a draft before it’s published. Draft is one of 8 built-in post statuses in WordPress, alongside other unpublished states like Pending (awaiting review) and Scheduled. While a post holds the draft status, you can edit and save it as many times as you like.

To save a draft, click the Save draft button at the top right of the editor; the label changes to Saved once the save succeeds. Next to it, the View button (formerly Preview) shows how the draft will look on the front end, with Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile sizes plus a Preview in new tab option.

Draft visibility

Site visitors can’t see a draft. It has no public URL, so anyone who isn’t logged in gets a not-found page, and search engines can’t index it. Only logged-in users with the proper role can view one, and that includes the editor’s front-end preview: it loads only for users who are logged in.

Draft vs. pending review

Both statuses mean the content is unpublished, but they mark different stages of the editorial workflow:

• Draft: you’re still working on the content. You can keep editing, saving, and previewing it, and you decide when (or whether) it publishes.
• Pending review: the author has marked the content ready, and it waits for a user with publishing permission (typically an Editor) to approve and publish it.
• Who sees which button: users who can’t publish, like Contributors, get a Submit for Review button instead of Publish; clicking it moves the post to pending.

The post status entry covers the full set of 8, including Private, Trash, and Auto-Draft.

Scheduling a draft

You can set a draft to publish itself later. Pick a future date in the editor’s settings panel and the Publish button becomes Schedule. Once you confirm, WordPress changes the post’s status from Draft to Scheduled (future), and it stops appearing under Drafts. To unschedule it, switch it back to a draft any time before the set publish date. Our guide to scheduling posts in WordPress walks through the steps.

Switching a published post back to a draft

To unpublish a post, open it in the editor and change its status from Published back to Draft (the Switch to draft option). The post leaves the public site immediately. Its URL then returns a not-found error, which breaks existing links and any search rankings the page earned. If those links or that traffic matter, redirect the old URL to a relevant published page before you switch. The Private status isn’t a workaround for visitors: a private post stays readable only for logged-in users with the required permission, so everyone else still gets a not-found page.

Recovering an unsaved draft

Closing the editor without saving doesn’t usually mean the work is gone. WordPress autosaves while you edit and stores a revision each time you save, so recent changes can often be restored from the editor. See autosave and revision for how each works and what it can bring back.