WordPress is no doubt a superb publishing platform. Many users have different requirements for publishing their articles and some may want to post stealthily on their WordPress based websites. Posting stealthily means that a particular post can be prevented from showing up in the home page and also we can prevent feeds from updating, so that your site visitors won’t be notified about this new post/article. The post will show up only on category page.
Here’s an example to better understand this concept. Suppose your Blog is based on technology, but there is a category named as “Personal” where you post about your personal life experiences. When writing a post for this “Personal” category, you may not want to feature that particular post in the front page (or home page) or in the feeds. That post will not be displayed in the feeds, thereby preventing subscribers from getting notified about this new post. This is helpful when you think that normal visitors are only interested in reading about technology and not about author’s personal life. The post will show up only in that “Personal” category page.
How to Hide Post from Homepage and RSS Feeds
For this task, we’ll be using Stealth Publish plugin. Install this plugin by going to Plugins > Add New and search for the name of this plugin. From the results, find this plugin and click on “Install Now”. Also activate this plugin after installing.
The best thing about this plugin is that its too easy to use. There’s no separate settings page. When you write the post, in the publish box, you can see that this plugin have added a small checkbox for “Stealth Publish”.
Now whenever you think that this specific post should not be featured on the home page, nor in feeds then just check mark this box “Stealth Publish”. But you need to check mark before hitting that “Publish” button. Go in this order – checkmark that box and then hit the publish button.
This is all you need to do to publish stealthily, without notifying your subscribers and preventing the post from displaying on the home page. Stealth Publish also prevents from notifying external services about the new published post.
You may be wondering what if by mistake you have clicked on “Publish” button and then realized that you wanted to stealth publish it. In this situation, first thing to do is to check mark that “Stealth Publish” box and then click on “Update” to update the post. The post will be removed from the home page but it would show up in feeds. If you’re using Feedburner then all you need to do is to login to your Feedburner account, go to “Troubleshootize” tab and then click on “Resync Now”. This should remove the post from the feeds, but it can take some time to do so.