An Easier Way to Share Progress on Your Website
We’re excited to announce Site Preview Links, a feature that will let you easily share a “Coming Soon” Business or eCommerce site.
Do you build sites for others? Have you ever struggled to coordinate and manage access to in-progress projects? How often do you have to help clients reset their passwords? We feel your pain, and we’re excited to announce Site Preview Links, a feature that will let you easily share a “Coming Soon” Business or eCommerce site.
Use Site Preview Links to Share Your Work
With Site Preview Links, you can generate a unique preview link for your in-progress Business or eCommerce site, allowing your team or clients to access the Coming Soon site without having to log in. This way, you can easily show off your work-in-progress and get feedback from your stakeholders without having to resend invites, update user roles, or reset passwords.
You can create and access the preview link directly from the Sites page:
You can then share the link with your team or client. When they access the preview link, they’ll bypass the Coming Soon screen and be able to view your site.
Site Preview Links is an easy-to-use feature that will save you time and hassle. It’s perfect for anyone who builds websites for others, whether you are an agency with a growing client roster, a contractor with just a handful of projects, or simply someone who knows a lot of people who need websites.
How Site Preview Links Work
WordPress.com uses a secure HMAC hashing algorithm to generate Preview Link that is unique across all sites. The possible number of unique hashes is 2256, which heavily exceeds the number of grains of sand in the world!
Users who access your site using the shared preview link can continue navigating through the site, as WordPress.com uses a browser cookie to preserve the link value for the user’s session.
The link won’t expire, but you can disable it anytime. Users who already have access to your site using the preview link won’t be able to access the site anymore once you disable the link.
If you change your mind, you can always enable the link again, and we will generate a new, unique, ready-to-share URL.
If you need help with Preview Links, check out our more detailed guide.
Build Your Next Site on WordPress.com
Try Preview Links today and see how it can help you save time and make your life easier. Your clients will be impressed with the convenience, and you’ll be able to get their feedback faster.
Preview Links are just one of the reasons WordPress.com is the best managed WordPress hosting on the planet alongside other features we released this year: the Sites page, SSH access, SSH keys, and our data center picker. If you are interested in more details, you can follow our Developer Blog.
What other feature would you find valuable? How could we make WordPress.com an even more powerful place to build a website? Feel free to leave a comment or submit your ideas in our short feature request form.
WordPress.com News 
Thank you so much for this! It’s really helpful 😃 Happy Holidays!
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You know what would be REALLY exciting? To get the word count function back when you draft a post.
LikeLiked by 11 people
Hey! Good news, the word count is still there – you can access it by clicking on the List View icon in the top left of the editor and then the Outline tab. Here are more details:
https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-com-classic-editor-deprecation-faqs/#the-word-count-in-the-block-editor
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sounds great! My suggestion is to improve the search function on your Help page.
LikeLiked by 7 people
Hi there!
Thanks for the feedback! I searched Help pages for “Coming Soon” and “Preview Links”, and I got great results.
Would you mind sharing more details on improvements you are looking for on the Help page?
LikeLiked by 5 people
The trouble I have is when I’m not sure exactly what to call the problem I’m having . The search function doesn’t seem very good at guessing my trouble . 😆 For example I was getting too many emails and I wanted to turn that off but I didn’t know what to call it in the help search . I eventually guessed the right terms.
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Thank you for creating this platform I am benefit from this this is one of the platform that I excited about it
LikeLiked by 2 people
It’s good to be here
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Sounds great!
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Thank you! Really helpful
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Hi – I would like to do this but your hyperlink takes me to this page of the current site that I am building and I don’t know where to go from here. Thanks, Sue ________________________________
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Can you reach out to support so we can take a closer look? Here’s how:
https://wordpress.com/support/help-support-options/
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Thanks for sharing this
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