Installing a plugin to see if it's the right fit is friction. You have to spin up a staging site, download a zip, upload it through the admin, activate it, seed some data so the screens aren't blank, then either revert or delete when you're done. That's a twenty-minute detour to answer a one-minute question.
Five free Royal Plugins now let you skip that detour entirely. Click Live Preview on the WordPress.org listing — or Try It Live on royalplugins.com — and a real WordPress admin boots inside your browser tab in a few seconds, with the plugin pre-activated and sample data already seeded. When you're done poking around, you close the tab and everything evaporates.
No hosting. No account. No install. This post covers how it works, what's in each of the five demos, and when an in-browser preview beats spinning up a staging site.
How WordPress Playground Works
WordPress Playground is an official WordPress project that runs a complete WordPress install in your browser using WebAssembly. PHP is compiled to WASM and executes client-side; the database is an in-memory SQLite. There is no remote server, no cloud account, and no data that leaves the tab. The same WordPress core, the same plugin PHP, and the same admin UI you'd see on a production install — just running in a sandbox on your machine.
Each demo is driven by a small blueprint.json file that ships with the plugin. The blueprint tells Playground:
- Which WordPress version and PHP version to boot
- Which plugin to install and activate
- Which admin page or frontend URL to land on
- What sample data to seed so the screens look real on first load
For our demos, the seeded data is the interesting part. An empty admin is a worse preview than a populated one because you can't see what the plugin actually does with content in it. So every Royal Plugin demo runs a runPHP step that creates posts, inserts database rows, configures options, and enables features — all before you land on the first screen.
Nothing touches our servers when you launch a preview. Your browser downloads WordPress + the plugin from WordPress.org's CDN, then runs everything locally. Close the tab and the whole sandbox is gone — no account, no data retention, no tracking.
The Five Plugin Demos
Each preview lands you on the single screen that best shows what the plugin does, with enough sample data pre-loaded that the UI looks like a real, in-use install rather than a fresh activation.
Royal Links — link management, cloaking, and click analytics
Royal Links is a free affiliate link manager, URL shortener, and click tracker. The demo boots directly into Links → All Links with 10 sample short links pre-created (royal, seobolt, backup, forgecache, tools, gh, blog, pricing, help, wporg) plus randomized click history for each one so the analytics charts render with real data. You can click into any link to see geo-targeting, A/B test settings, QR code generation, and the full analytics dashboard populated with hundreds of sample clicks across browsers, devices, OSes, and countries.
Royal Access — frontend accessibility toolbar with 14 controls
Royal Access is an accessibility toolbar that is explicitly not an overlay. The demo lands on the frontend of a sample post so the floating accessibility button is visible in the bottom-right corner. Open it and all 14 controls are live: font size scaling, high contrast, dark mode, dyslexia font, line/letter/word spacing, highlight links, big cursor, stop animations, hide images, monochrome, reading guide, and highlight focus. The sample post has headings, paragraphs, links, and an image so you can test how each control actually affects real content.
RoyalComply — GDPR / CCPA cookie consent banner
RoyalComply blocks analytics and marketing scripts until a visitor consents, with Google Consent Mode v2 support and regional banner behavior for GDPR, CCPA, and 19 US state privacy laws. The demo lands on the frontend with the banner already visible at the bottom. Click Accept All, Reject All, or Cookie Settings to see all three consent paths and the category toggles. The Consent Log, Banner Design, and Cookie Scanner admin pages are all reachable via the sidebar.
SiteVault — backups, restore, and migration
SiteVault is a free WordPress backup and migration plugin. The demo lands on the Backups page with four sample backup entries seeded in the database: a recent full backup, a database snapshot, a plugins & themes bundle, and a weekly full backup from a week ago — each with realistic sizes, timestamps, and metadata. You can see what a populated backup history looks like, explore the Migration and Settings tabs, and trigger a real backup from inside the sandbox if you want to see the live progress UI.
Royal MCP — Model Context Protocol server for WordPress
Royal MCP exposes your WordPress site to AI platforms like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini via the Model Context Protocol, with API key auth, rate limiting, and activity logging. The demo lands on the settings page with the server already enabled, a demo API key generated, and the Claude + ChatGPT platform integrations pre-toggled. The Activity Log page has six realistic entries covering successful tools/list and tools/call requests, a rate-limited request, and an unauthorized attempt — so you can see what the audit trail actually looks like without having to wire up a real MCP client first.
admin / passwordEvery preview ships with the same default credentials. The login screen is bypassed on first load, but if you log out to test the frontend from a visitor's perspective, use those credentials to get back in.
When a Live Preview Beats a Real Install
The preview is not a replacement for installing the plugin on your production site — at some point, if you decide to use it, you will install the real thing. But for the evaluation phase, the in-browser demo beats a staging install in a few specific situations:
- You want to see the UI before committing. Screenshots are static. A 30-second click-through tells you whether the admin is the kind of thing you want to live in for the next few years.
- You're on a restricted machine. No permission to install plugins on the company WordPress site? The browser sandbox doesn't care about that.
- You want to compare two plugins back-to-back. Open two tabs, run two previews, swap between them. Much faster than standing up two staging sites.
- You're writing documentation or a review. Every demo has the same sample data every time, so screenshots are reproducible and annotated walkthroughs don't depend on your personal data.
- You want to show a client or stakeholder. Link a decision-maker directly to a working admin with sample data in place. They can poke at it without you having to build a staging site for them.
Situations where the preview is not the right answer: anything involving external service integration (OAuth flows, payment gateways, third-party APIs) won't work in the sandbox because those services can't reach back into your browser. Backups-to-cloud-storage demos, for example, stop at the "pick a destination" step. For those, you still want a real install.
How to Launch a Preview
Three paths, all equivalent:
1. From royalplugins.com
The Try Any Free Plugin Live strip on the homepage has a pill for each of the five plugins. Click the one you want and the sandbox opens in a new tab.
2. From the plugin's own page on royalplugins.com
Every free plugin's marketing page has a Live Preview (or Try It Live) button next to the Download button in the hero. Same destination.
3. From the WordPress.org plugin listing
On each plugin's WordPress.org page, look for the Live Preview button alongside the Download button in the sidebar. WordPress.org reads the Preview-On-WordPress-Playground: yes header in the plugin's readme and the blueprint.json file at the plugin's trunk root — if both are present, WP.org renders the button automatically. (The WordPress directory can take a few hours to pick up a new preview after release; if you committed in the last hour or two, be patient.)
Pick One and Try It
All five demos are linked above. If you're not sure where to start, try Royal Links — it's the most visually populated demo, so you get an immediate feel for what the plugin is like in a working site. From there, you can hop back to the homepage strip and pick another.
More plugins will get previews over the coming weeks. If there's a specific Royal Plugin you'd like to see in the sandbox, let us know.