Once you’ve added all your content to your Page or Post you have the option of Saving the Page as a Draft or Publishing the page. Clicking the Save Draft link will simply save your Page/Post. This is handy if you would like to come back at a later date to add more content or if you’re simply not ready to publish yet.

If you’d like to see what you Page/Post will look like before you Publish, click the Preview button. This will open a preview of the current Page/Post in another browser tab.

There are several options available when saving. By default the Status is set to Draft when you simply click Save Draft. Ticking the Pending Review checkbox within the Status & Visibility panel in the Settings Sidebar sets the page Status to Pending Review. This means the draft is waiting for review by an editor prior to publication.

There is also an option to make the Post ‘Stick to the Front Page’. Sticky Posts are placed at the top of all blog posts and stay there even after new posts are published. Tick the Stick to the Front Page checkbox to make the Post ‘Sticky’. This option is only available for Posts. It’s not available for Pages.

You can also change the visibility of the Page by clicking the link just to the right of Visibility within the Status & Visibility panel.

• Public is the default and means the page is viewable to all.
• Private hides the content from the public completely. Normal users and visitors will not be aware of private content. You will only see the private content when you are logged into your WordPress blog.
• Password Protected allows you to assign a password to your page. Only people who have the password will be able to access the page.

Within the Permalink panel in the Settings Sidebar is the full URL for your Page or Post. You’ll see this URL after saving your content for the first time, along with the Page/Post Slug that was generated for the page. Clicking this URL link will take you to the published page, or if the page hasn’t been published yet, a preview of the page. You can edit this page slug by editing the URL field just above the URL link. You might decide to do this for improving SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Most times though, you’ll simply leave the default URL which WordPress automatically generates based on your Page/Post Title.

By default, when you click the Publish button your Page/Post is published immediately. To change this, click the link just to the right of Publish within the Status & Visibility panel. You can then select the date and time that you’d like to schedule your Page/Post to be published. After setting a date & time to publish, you must still click the Publish button to publish at the desired date and time.

Publishing your content is now a two-step process. After clicking the Publish… button, you’re shown a new publish panel, confirming your selection, along with giving you another chance to update your contents visibility & publish date. Clicking the Publish button here will publish your Page/Post and make it live on your website.

If you want to turn off this extra pre-publish check, you can do so by unticking the checkbox on the bottom of this extra Publish panel. Once turned off, the Publish button will publish your content immediately, in the same way it did prior to WordPress 5.0. If you decide at a later time that you want to turn this pre-publish check back on, you can do so using the Options panel. This panel can be found by clicking the Optionsmenu option under the Show more tools & options icon in the top-right corner of the page (). Once the Options Panel displays, tick the Enable Pre-publish Checks checkbox to re-enable these pre-publish checks.