Scheduling Posts To Publish In The Future

December 29. 2019

If you are new to the WordPress world, you may not yet be familiar with one extremely useful feature this platform offers. Namely, once you finish creating a WordPress post or page, you don’t have to publish it that same moment – you can schedule it to be published at a time that’s most convenient for you. However, this feature is somewhat hidden and hard to notice, which is why many people miss it. But that’s what we are here for – to let you know that scheduling posts to publish in the future is a viable option, as well as to teach you how to do it! Buckle up – you are about to discover a whole new world.

The convenience behind scheduling posts to publish in the future

Whether you have created a blog website that is completely focused on your career as a blogger or you have a commercial website that also includes a blog section isn’t what’s important here. What’s really important is for you to be regular with your posts as they help your site remain relevant and rank better across different search engines. However, we all know how unpredictable life is. There might come a time when you won’t be able to create posts and publish them right away. And that’s when this feature comes in handy. There are many reasons why you will want to schedule posts in advance and only some of them are as follows.

• You might want to get the most benefit from the peak traffic hours and increase your page views.
• If you are going on a vacation you can schedule your posts and go free of any worries.
• You won’t have to suppress your work in case that inspiration strikes as you can write as many posts as you want and schedule them to be published in the future.

Imagine how relaxed and stress-free you will be once you know that your next post is already scheduled. Plus, you won’t have to worry about writing creative content at the last minute. Now that you are convinced of the benefits of scheduling posts and are already searching for the option on the screen, let our WordPress team of experts show you the exact place to look.

A step by step guide to scheduling posts in WordPress

Let us first ask you this – are you still using the Classic Editor or have you switched to the Gutenberg WordPress Editor? Because even though these two versions have certain similarities, they also come with their fair share of differences. Depending on your answer, the process of scheduling posts will vary. Since we know that there are a lot of you who much rather prefer the Classic Editor and vice versa, we will cover both processes from start to finish.

Scheduling posts in the Gutenberg WordPress Editor

What we haven’t uncovered so far is the fact that scheduling posts to be published in the future is extremely easy! You just need to know where to look. And that’s under the ‘Document’ tab in the right column of the edit screen. So go ahead – take a look and locate the ‘Status & Visibility’ panel. You will notice a ‘Publish’ option that will have a link named ‘Immediately’ next to it. And voila – once you click this link, you will be able to choose the exact time and date you want your post to be published.

Bear in mind that you can also go back in time with WordPress and backdate your blog post. If you choose a date in the future, you will notice that the once ‘Publish’ button will now turn to the ‘Schedule’ button. And that’s it – all you have to do is click on the ‘Schedule’ button and your post will be ready for publishing in the time and date of your choosing. Of course, you should check whether the post was published once the time comes. But in 99% of cases, WordPress never misses.

Using the Classic Editor

Even though the Gutenberg WordPress Editor is a new, intuitive and user-friendly version, a lot of people prefer to stick to the Classic Editor. We won’t discuss whether this is a right or wrong decision as there isn’t such a thing in this matter. But what we will do is explain once again the process of scheduling your posts with this version of WordPress.

Once you add the finishing touches to your post, look at the right column of the edit screen. You should locate the ‘Publish’ meta box and click on the ‘Edit’ link next to which will be the ‘Publish Immediately’ option. Similarly to the process of scheduling posts with the Gutenberg Editor, you will now get to choose the time and date on which you want your post to be published. The blue ‘Publish’ button will once again turn into a ‘Schedule’ button and you will be able to save changes by clicking on it.

Always check the published posts

If you plan on scheduling posts to publish in the future, you must know that some problems might arise. As previously mentioned, they won’t happen 9 out of 10 times. But if there is a misconfiguration on your WordPress hosting server, scheduled posts might not get published. If you notice this is happening to you and it’s happening frequently, you can install the WP Missed Schedule plugin. It’s also worth mentioning that you can unschedule a post simply by changing its status to draft. All in all, this option is one bloggers love the most. It allows you to publish your posts quickly, easily, and always on time. There will be no more working holidays or exhaustion due to frantic timezones. What more could a person ask for?