How to schedule posts in advance on WordPress
When you access the screen for writing a new post, on the right you will find some boxes with various options.
What we will explore in this guide is the first, the one called "Publish".
Within this section you will find the buttons for save your draft, preview the post and publish it.
You will also find three additional entries:
- state: which allows you to see the current status of the post and change it, for example, from "Draft" to "Published". This feature is very useful, for example, if you want to change the status of an already published content, making it a draft again.
- Visibility: this option is used to determine if your content will be publicly visible, private (ie, visible only to you), or password protected (ie, visible only to those who have the access key you set).
- Publish: the third and last option is the one that interests us!
By default, this option is configured so that the content is published “Now”. By clicking “Edit”, you can though set a day and time to publish the post.
When you click OK, you will see that the blue "Publish" button changes to "Schedules". At this point, your post is not yet scheduled; you will have to click on “Schedules” to have it queued and published on the day and time you set.
That's all, this is the native functionality to schedule posts in advance in WordPress.
Simple, right?
Now that you know how to use it, you can write your posts in advance and schedule them even while you're on vacation or when you can't write anyway.
Now let's see some plugins that extend this functionality, making it even more useful.
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WP Missed Schedule Fix Failed Future Posts
This tool does not actually implement any additional functionality. Instead it serves to ensure that the native one for scheduling posts in advance in WordPress works correctly.
When planning a post, there is a so-called cron job which must work automatically to ensure that the publication takes place on the day and time set by you.
Sometimes, however, it does not work and the posts are not published or this happens late. There are several reasons:
- there are conflicts with plugins,
- there are configuration problems related to the server,
- there are configuration problems related to the database,
- there are DNS related problems,
etc.
The plugin WP Missed Schedule Fix Failed Future Posts it serves to solve these problems and ensure that the scheduled posts are published at the right time.
Editorial Calendar is a pretty popular plugin for managing and scheduling your blog's editorial calendar.
What is an editorial calendar? “Simply”, is the list of all the posts you are going to publish, in chronological order.
When you install the plugin, in your Dashboard, inside Articles, you will find a new entry called “Calendar”.
Clicking on it opens a real calendar, in which you can add new posts and assign them the status of "Draft", "Pending review" or "Scheduled". For scheduled posts, you can also change the posting time.
This plugin is particularly useful if you work with different contributors on content creation and want to keep an eye on everyone's work.
