Why you might want to schedule a post
Creating content takes a lot of planning and coordination. It’s great when you’ve been able to work ahead and have posts queued up and ready to go, but it can be a pain to have to remember to go in and post them the day you want them to go live.
Luckily, it’s easy to schedule a post to be published in the future automatically so you don’t have to remember to do it yourself. Just follow these steps:
Step one
Click on Posts in the sidebar of the admin area. At the top of the screen, you’ll see All and Drafts. Content you’ve started but haven’t published can be found under Drafts.
Click on the post you’d like to schedule to open it in the editor.
Step two
Under the Post tab on the far right of the editor screen, click on the box to the right of Publish (this is under Summary). A calendar drop-down will appear.
Choose the time and date you’d like the post to be published.
The time you select will be in whatever timezone your contact page references. For example, if your contact information gives times in PST, the timing of your posts will also be set to PST. Contact support to adjust the timezone settings for your website.
Step three
The button that normally says Publish at the top of the screen will now say Schedule. Once you hit that button, you will be asked to confirm if you want to schedule this post to be published at the time you provided. If everything looks correct, click Schedule.
If you want to change anything, you can on this screen, or you can click Cancel to go back and make changes.
Step four
If you are planning an email campaign or social media post about your new blog post, WordPress will give you the new post’s URL after you schedule it. You can copy the URL and use it in your drafted messages, but nothing will show up at the URL until the scheduled time.
We recommend scheduling your posts to be published an hour before any other communication goes out about them, such as emails or social media posts. You may also want to check that the post is live before sending those out. This is because WordPress’ scheduling feature is known to have some hiccups and your post may not go live at the scheduled time if no one is currently on your site.
If you plan to use the scheduling feature a lot, there are ways to make it more reliable, so reach out to support if you are interested in this functionality.
📢 WordPress Posts (Blog)