Earlier this year, I had to visit Mumbai for a few days due to some work. Since I blog frequently, I wanted to publish my blog post in one of those days. But since I was travelling, I knew I would not be able to publish the blog post.
I had only 2 options. Either publish the blog post before leaving for Mumbai or find a way to schedule it so that it gets published on the date I wanted it to.
If you don’t know yet, WordPress lets you schedule a post well in advance. Yes, you can actually set a date in the future when you want your blog post to get published and on that date and time, WordPress will automatically publish your blog post for you.
So I scheduled the blog post for a future date instead of publishing it before leaving for Mumbai.
WordPress then took care to publish the blog post on the date and time I had scheduled.
Pretty cool, isn’t it?
This is why I like WordPress so much. Most of the features that are essential for blogging are already built into it.
Want to know how to schedule WordPress posts? Let me show you how.
How to Schedule WordPress Posts
Here is a short video tutorial that will show you how to schedule the posts. If you like to read instead of watching the video then all the steps are written right below the video.
Once you are done writing your blog post, click the Edit link next to Publish field in the Publish meta box.
You will then be presented with fields to enter a date.
Set some date in the future and then click the Ok button.
Now the Publish button will change to Schedule button. Click the Schedule button.
That’s it! You have successfully scheduled a post to be published on a future date.
You must be wondering that was easy but why would I ever need to use this scheduling feature of WordPress?
Why Might Want to Schedule WordPress Posts?
There could be multiple reasons why you might want to use this scheduling feature of WordPress.
What if you want to take a vacation from blogging but don’t want your readers to wait for reading your next blog post till you get back from vacation? An almost similar situation that I was in but I wasn’t really vacationing.
Or maybe majority your readers do not stay in the same time zone as you. You might want to publish your blog post so that majority of the people see your post while drinking a cup of coffee in the morning.
Or maybe you just keep forgetting to publish your blog post manually.
This is where you can take advantage of WordPress’s inbuilt feature to schedule a post.
And If You Do Take Advantage…
Let me know in the comments. I would love to hear about it.
I guess you have now got a pretty good idea of why and how to schedule WordPress posts. So don’t forget to share this tutorial with your friends who might not know of this WordPress feature. And if you would like to learn more about making WordPress websites, then check out this guide on how to make a WordPress website without writing any code. It covers every aspect of how to build a WordPress website.
