For most of my WordPress based websites, I like to publish on a schedule. I have it all marked on my online calendar, showing which days of the week I will publish articles on which of my blogs. I even have it scheduled right down to what time I publish a new article. For one of my sites, a new article is published daily at 5am, like clock work.
I know, many of you must be thinking that it must be very hard to keep up with the schedule, and make sure you are online right at the exact time that you want to publish. Truth is, though, that it is not hard at all because WordPress has a built in feature that will allow you to set the publishing time and date of any post!
Set up a Schedule for publishing on your site
That is right, you can write your post any time that it is convenient for you to do so, and then set the time and date when you want the post to be published and visible to the public! That makes everything quite easy. In my case, sometimes I write a post and schedule it for publishing days, weeks, even months later! In fact, when Sunday morning comes around to kick off a new week, normally I have all of my blog articles already written and scheduled for publication for the entire week ahead! So, for example, this week, I am working on writing articles for my sites which you will read next week! The articles that you will read this week were written last week. By writing in advance like this, I can schedule the articles to be published at the time and date that I have predetermined. It’s easy!
How do you do it?
Click Edit to set the publishing schedule
After clicking edit you can set the date and time for publishing
Well, the first thing to do, of course, is to go to your site and write the article that you intend to schedule for publication. Set everything like you normally would – the Category, Tags, and anything else that you need to set for the post. When you finish, don’t hit the “Publish” button like you normally would, instead, click on the “Edit” link next to where it currently says “Publish immediately” which is just above the Publish button. When you click on “edit”, it will open up a small menu where you can set the date and time that you want the article to be published.
Next, set the date and time in the editing box and click the “OK” button. See the blue button that says “Publish”? That will change and say “Schedule” instead. If everything else on your post is ready to go, just click on the new “Schedule” button and your post is ready to go. It will be published at the time that you scheduled it for.
Trouble in Paradise?
I have been using this method of scheduled publishing for years already. I feel that by publishing at the same time and day, over time your readers come to expect articles at a certain time, and they will come to your site looking for your new article. Bringing people back to you site is a good thing, right? For me it sure is!
A month or so ago, though, when WordPress came out with it’s latest update to the software, version 3.5, I noticed that many of my scheduled posts are not being published. If you look on the list of posts for your blog, it will show the date for publication with red letters that say “Missed Schedule.” You can then manually publish the post, but that misses the whole purpose of having things set up for auto-posting.
Because I experienced this problem regularly after upgrading to WordPress 3.5, I decided that I needed to do something to fix the problem, so I started doing some research. I found that others must be having the same problems, because a bunch of newer plugins have been released to address this very problem.
I have started using a plugin called “WP Missed Schedule Fix Failed Posts“. This plugin checks every 5 minutes to see if any posts have missed their scheduled publish time. If any have missed the schedule, they get published immediately. So, in theory, when using this plugin no post should miss it’s schedule by more than 5 minutes.
I have been using this plugin for a couple of weeks now, and every post has been published on schedule, something that was not happening before.
Do it!
So, if you publish regularly on your blog or website, I highly recommend setting up a publishing schedule, and using the post scheduling method that I have outlined. I believe that by doing so your blog will gain more readers, and will be more professional too. Try out the plugin that I linked to, I believe that it will save you a few headaches too.
Good luck with your WordPress website!