How to Avoid Accidental Publishing in WordPress

After years of blogging and managing multiple WordPress sites, we’ve had our fair share of heart-stopping moments.

You know the ones – where you accidentally hit ‘Publish’ on a half-finished post, or worse, on one that’s barely started. It’s happened to us, and we bet it’s happened to you too.

But here’s the good news: we’re no longer nervous about accidental publishing. Why? Because WordPress now has a built-in way to prevent these mishaps.

In this guide, we’ll show you how this built-in safety feature works. We will also share some extra tips to help you create a safer publishing workflow on your site.

Why Accidental Publishing on Your WordPress Blog Can Happen

In our experience, the most common reason for accidental publishing on WordPress is simple muscle memory.

The ‘Publish’ button is located right next to ‘Save Draft’ and ‘Preview,’ making it easy to click the wrong one when you’re working quickly.

For an established blog, this can be a real problem. An unfinished post could instantly be sent out to thousands of email subscribers or get shared across social media feeds.

Plus, quickly unpublishing the post can create a new issue. Anyone who clicks the original link from an email or social media will land on a 404 error page, which creates a negative user experience.

The risk is even higher on a multi-author site. On our own team, we’ve built a specific editorial workflow to ensure a writer can’t publish a post before it’s thoroughly reviewed and ready.

With that said, let’s take a look at our beginner’s guide on how you can easily avoid accidental publishing in WordPress.

How WordPress Lets You Avoid Accidental Publishing

The WordPress Gutenberg block editor automatically includes an additional confirmation message before you publish a post or page in WordPress.

In the past, this feature had to be added to WordPress by using a publish confirm plugin to configure different settings or adding custom code snippets, but now it’s included automatically.

Now, if you open a WordPress page or post and click the ‘Publish’ button, it won’t publish the article right away.

Instead, a pre-publish panel will slide out from the right. This panel gives you a final chance to check your post settings and asks, ‘Are you ready to publish?’

You will need to click the ‘Publish’ button a second time to actually make the post or page live. This confirmation step makes it much harder to publish a post by accident.

This additional confirmation message makes it much harder to accidentally publish a post since you’ll need to click the ‘Publish’ button two times.

Bonus: Pro Tips for a Safer Publishing Workflow

Even with the built-in confirmation step, mistakes can happen.

Here are some professional habits and tools you can use to add extra layers of safety to your publishing process:

• Use a Pre-Publish Checklist: You can use a plugin like PublishPress to create a checklist of tasks that must be completed before the ‘Publish’ button can be clicked. This is a great way to make sure every post is reviewed, has a featured image, and is properly categorized.
• Leverage User Roles: On a multi-author blog, assign writers the ‘Contributor’ role. This allows them to write posts but not publish them. An ‘Editor’ or ‘Administrator’ must approve the post, creating a mandatory review step.
• Edit Live Posts in a Draft: Never make major edits directly on a published post. Instead, copy the content into a new draft to work on it safely. Once your edits are finalized, you can paste the new version into the original live post.
• Know How to Use Post Revisions: Think of post revisions as your safety net. If a mistake goes live, WordPress saves previous versions of your content. You can use revisions to quickly restore an earlier version of the post to undo the error.

We use all of these tips on our multi-author blog, and they have really helped us avoid accidental publishing and improve editorial workflow.

Frequently Asked Questions About Accidental Publishing

Here are some questions that our readers have frequently asked us about accidentally publishing posts in WordPress:

Can I disable the ‘Are you ready to publish?’ confirmation in WordPress?

The two-step publish confirmation is a core feature of the WordPress block editor designed to prevent mistakes. It cannot be disabled through standard settings.

While it could be removed with custom code, we strongly advise against it as it is an essential safety feature.

What’s the difference between a Contributor and an Author role in WordPress?

The key difference is publishing capability. The ‘Contributor’ role allows a user to write and edit their own posts, but they cannot publish them. Their posts must be reviewed and published by an Editor or Admin.

The ‘Author’ role allows a user to write, edit, and publish their own posts without approval. For a safer workflow, the Contributor role is the best choice for writers.

Is there a plugin to edit a live post without copying it to a new draft?

Yes, there are plugins that make this process easier. For example, the Duplicator plugin allows you to clone a live page or post.

You can then edit the cloned version as a draft and, once finished, copy the content over to the live post. This is a more structured way to handle major revisions.

Does WordPress save unlimited post revisions? Will it slow down my site?

By default, WordPress can save a large number of post revisions. While this is useful for recovery, having too many revisions can increase the size of your website’s database over time.

You can limit the number of revisions WordPress saves by adding a code snippet with a plugin like WPCode.

We hope this article helped you learn how to avoid accidental publishing in WordPress. You may also want to see our expert picks of the best Gutenberg block plugins and how to automatically schedule your WordPress blog posts.

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