Want to publish unlisted WordPress pages? The simple plugin that does it all.

October 6, 2022

Recently updated on January 12th, 2024 at 03:57 pm

When you want to your landing pages to target specific audiences, publishing as unlisted is invaluable. This is because it gives you full control over how – and where – your customers find your content.

Unlisted WordPress posts and pages simply aren’t visible on your site. They don’t even show up in search results. The only way to access an unlisted page is through a private link shared directly with the user. While hiding your content may sound harmful to site traffic, it can actually be quite helpful in supporting your marketing campaigns.

Unlisted publishing helps you to respond faster and more strategically to consumer behaviour

Take, for example, if you want your loyal customers to access exclusive, promotional content. You can have customised, unlisted content ready to be shared, without any risk of it reaching the wrong eyes or ears. Put simply, unlisted publishing helps you to respond faster and more strategically to consumer behaviour.

Even outside of marketing, there are plenty of uses for publishing private pages. The ability to host content online without it becoming public domain is highly valuable across all kinds of content creation teams. And if it sounds helpful for you, too – you’re in luck. The WordPress plugin below can enable unlisted publishing for just about any website on the platform.

The Unlist Posts & Pages plugin

Created by Brainstorm Force and Nikhil Chavan, Unlist Posts & Pages is one of the most downloaded plugins for publishing discreet, unlisted WordPress pages – and it’s not hard to see why. It offers a lean, straightforward process for creating and converting unlisted content, and it’s compatible with just about everything else on the platform.

For those interested in the technical side, the plugin works by updating the MySQL query directly in the WP_Query class of WordPress. Meaning it works well with any other plugin that uses WP_Query to pull pages or posts from the database. But for those who just want to get the Unlist Posts & Pages plugin set up and ready to go, you don’t have to worry about any of that. That’s because installation is a breeze, even for beginners.

Installing and using the plugin

Here’s how it works, from start to finish:

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New
Install and activate the Unlist Posts & Pages plugin
Go to Pages > Add New
Create a title for your page and add your content, then click Publish
On the right side of your screen, tick the box that says Unlist this Post
Click on Update

And that’s it! When you go to the front end, your unlisted page should now only be accessible through its specified URL. Now it’s just up to you to create targeted content to reach those specific audience segments.