How To Schedule Posts For A Future Date

Every now and then it becomes necessary to plan ahead in life, and blogging is no different. Sometimes you write a post that you just aren’t ready to share with the world right away, but you know exactly when you want it to go out. Maybe you’re planning a two or three part series, but you didn’t feel like writing post number one first.

Or maybe (just maybe) you’re going on an awesome three week vacation to someplace tropical, but don’t want to abandon your readers for that long.

Whatever your reasons, the good news is that it’s not only possible to pre-date posts, but incredibly easy to do with a WordPress blog.

The first step is to write your post as you normally would. If you need to stop in the middle and save a draft, no problem. You’re literally going to do everything as you would for any other post. The fun part comes in when the post is ready to be published.

Rather than clicking on the “Publish” button as you normally would, look up one line to where it says “Publish immediately.” Click the “Edit” link next to that line and a series of fields will be displayed allowing you to select a month, day, year and time, right down to the minute. Once you’ve entered the date and time you want your post to be published, click the “OK” button, and the scheduling info you just selected will be displayed.

You’ll now notice that the “Publish” button has been replaced with one that says “Schedule.” Click on that and your post will go live at the time you’ve chosen.

If you change your mind at any point you can always change the date by clicking the “Edit” link again. To cancel the scheduled posting entirely and post manually, click the “Edit” link next to the post status. Select “Draft” from the drop down menu, click the “Update Post” button and you’re all set. Your post won’t go live until you are good and ready.

There you go! You now know how to schedule posts in advance. So the next time you go on a post-writing marathon, you don’t have to worry about saving everything as a draft and remembering when you want to publish it – just schedule the publish dates you want and put your feet up… you deserve it.