Time for another WordPress Wednesday! Weekly tips for new and established self-hosted WordPress users, designed to help you get the most out of your site from Sarah, a WordPress website developer.
How to Schedule a Post in WordPress
Sometimes it’s hard to find time to fit blogging into your daily schedule. You write a weekly feature on your blog but you’ve got plans on the day it’s supposed to go live, so you end up rushing to get it posted on time or you miss it completely. It happens to us all at one point or another, especially if you’re blog isn’t your main job (which it isn’t for a lot of people!)
Thankfully, WordPress has a nifty solution for your scheduling woes. Did you know that you can actually schedule posts ahead of time in WordPress? It’s one of those ‘hidden in plain sight’ features – if you know about it already you probably use it a lot, but if you don’t you might not have ever noticed the option.
When you’re writing a post, you’ll see a Publish box on the right hand side of your content editor, at the top. This is where you save drafts, preview your posts and ultimately publish them.
See that Publish Immediately link?
If you click on the Edit link, you’ll then get this window:
Pick a date and time and click okay, and it’ll change to this:
Just be wary of that first box, where it says 04-Apr. In my mind, this is a little confusing, as it can look like it’s publishing on the 4th of April. However, if you click into that box you’ll see it’s actually a drop down box with all the months listed, the next box is the date, then the year.
Once you’ve selected a date and time you then just need to click on the Schedule button:
Ta-da, your post is now scheduled! :) It’s that simple, but, if like me, you struggle to remember what date it is for what day (for example, I post something every Friday and every Sunday, but I don’t always know what the dates will be on those days) you can use this really simple Editorial Calendar plugin to help. It gives you a month by month calendar showing all your scheduled posts.
You can drag and drop the posts to different dates, edit them and even create new drafts from this view, so if you do a lot of weekly posts it’s worth installing! (Once you’ve installed it you’ll find it in the left-hand sidebar, under Posts).
Do you schedule your WordPress posts? And if not, do you think you’ll start doing it now you know how easy it is? :)
Thanks for this; I learnt a while ago that I could backdate my publishing date but it didn’t occur to me that I could set the date for the future too.
Also with the editorial calendar, just to confirm that it doesn’t publish posts automatically, you’ll I suppose have to schedule it to publish on a future date, otherwise it wouldn’t publish from the editorial calendar, right?
It’s how we do most of the posts on this site – they’re all scheduled to post at the same time every day. The editorial calendar just gives you an easier way to view your posts than the posts screen, you would still need to set the actual post to draft or scheduled.