Scheduling a post to publish later

Scheduling tells WordPress to publish a post at a future date and time on its own. You write it now, set when it should go out, and close the laptop. The control is hidden in plain sight: it is the word immediately in the Publish panel, and clicking Edit beside it is the whole feature.

Scheduling a post

1. Write the post as normal, including its category and featured image. A scheduled post goes out exactly as it is, so finish it properly.
2. In the Publish panel, find Publish immediately and click Edit beside it.
3. Set the month, day, year and time.
4. Click OK. The blue button changes from Publish to Schedule.
5. Click Schedule. The post now shows a status of Scheduled in your Posts list.

Changing your mind

• Different time: open the post, click Edit beside the date again, change it, then Update.
• Publish it now instead: set the date to the current time, or set Status back to Draft and then Publish.
• Cancel it: set Status to Draft and Update. The schedule is forgotten and nothing goes out.

When it is genuinely useful

• Writing several posts in one sitting and spacing them over the following weeks. This is the big one, and it is the only realistic way most businesses keep a blog going.
• Announcements tied to a date: an event, a seasonal opening, a price change.
• Publishing at a sensible hour rather than at eleven at night when you actually wrote it.

The one technical thing worth knowing

WordPress publishes scheduled posts when somebody visits your site, not by a clock ticking on a server. On a busy site that is indistinguishable from exact. On a very quiet site, a post scheduled for 6am might not actually appear until the first visitor arrives, which could be later.

Occasionally a post gets stuck showing Missed schedule in the Posts list. That is not something you need to diagnose. Open it and press Publish to push it out, and tell us if it happens more than once, because it points at something we should fix rather than something you should work around.

Finding what is scheduled

Go to Posts. Scheduled ones appear with the date they will publish and a Scheduled label, and there is a Scheduled filter at the top of the list once you have any. Worth a glance before you write something new, so you do not double up.

What we need if something fails

The post title and the time it should have gone out. If you see “Missed schedule”, say so in those words, because it tells us exactly where to look.

Related

• Creating a blog post
• Saving, previewing and publishing
• Editing or updating an existing post