WordPress lets you make a post public, private, or password protected.
What it doesn’t let you do is make it unlisted.
YouTube has had this for years: a video that only exists for people with the link. It does not show up in search. It does not appear on your channel. It is not fully private either. It just quietly exists for the people you choose to share it with.
I use that feature all the time, and I kept wondering why WordPress did not have the same thing for posts.
So I built Unlisted.
It creates a secret share URL for any post, hides that post from the usual places WordPress surfaces content, and lets anyone with the link read it.
From the user’s point of view, it is beautifully simple. Flip a toggle, copy the link, send it to whoever needs to see the post.
From the developer’s point of view, it is slightly less simple.
To make it work properly, the plugin has to generate secure tokens, route secret URLs, hide posts from archives and search, keep them out of feeds and sitemaps, block access from the normal permalink, and surface the whole thing neatly inside the editor.
In other words, quite a lot of machinery was required to create something that feels like it should have been there all along.
And that is often the mark of a good feature. The user sees one tidy little button. Behind the scenes, a small orchestra is sweating.
Also, in the spirit of the age, this was vibe coded with Cursor and WordPress Studio, which felt very appropriate for a plugin inspired by a missing toggle.
It is called Unlisted, and I built it because sometimes you do not want to publish a post to the world. You just want to share a link.
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