What is post status in WordPress? Every piece of content you plan to publish as a WordPress website owner will likely go through multiple stages of editing. Categorizing all of your posts before (and after) going live will save you and your team a lot of time and stress. One way to do this is with post statuses.

👉 Post statuses enable WordPress users to get a better idea of what the workflow status of a post is. Adding a post status allows for simple categorization of your WordPress content before it goes live.

Understanding post status ⏳

Using post status, users can notify WordPress of their content’s current status along the editing workflow of the site. For instance, Draft is the status saved for incomplete posts. Once the post has been made public, the status is updated to Published. Plus, there’s a range of statuses in between.

Specifying a post status gives WordPress more leeway in how it processes and displays individual blog entries. For instance, drafts won’t show up on the front page or anywhere else that visitors can see by default.

If you’re editing a page or post, look for the Publish meta box in the screen’s upper right corner to change the post status.

👉 WordPress has eight different post statuses, some of which are used more frequently than others. For those who have been using WordPress for some time, you might already know about these three:

  • Draft: A blog entry that has been saved but is not visible to the public.
  • Published: A completed post that can be viewed by site visitors.
  • Trash: A post that was moved to the trash but not removed permanently. Posts that are tagged as trash are hidden from visitors.

👉 Now that we’ve covered the basics of what is post status in WordPress, let’s go over some other options that you may not be familiar with:

  • Scheduled: A piece of content that has been set for release at a later time.
  • Pending Review: An unpublished post made by a user without permission to publish it. The post won’t be available to the public until it’s been approved by an authorized user.
  • Private: Posts that are hidden from everyone except administrators.
  • Auto-draft: An edited version of a post that was saved automatically as you were making changes.
  • Inherited: Assigned to items that take on the status of their parent post. This is typically the case with attachments and revisions.

Custom post statuses can also be added via themes and plugins, so your WordPress setup can contain more than those mentioned above.

Wrapping up: what is post status in WordPress? 🤓

In WordPress, the post status can be changed for each post to reflect its progress in the workflow. WordPress provides eight different post statuses out of the box: draft, published, trash, scheduled, pending, private, auto-draft, and inherited.

Changing a post’s status to reflect its current stage in the process is a helpful way to maintain order and improve productivity, especially when collaborating with a team.

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