WordPress has this wonderful feature that allows you to schedule posts to be automatically published at a specified time. This feature is a complete blessing for travel bloggers and bloggers who go on vacations. When you are in a different time zone, you don’t want to worry about getting up at odd hours to publish a post. You can simply relax and enjoy your vacation while WordPress schedule post feature do the work for you. It is all good until you realize that your entire publishing schedule was messed up, and none of your posts were published when you were away. If this has happened to you before, or you are someone who use the schedule post feature regularly, then you want to implement this trick to prevent the missing schedule error. In this article, we will show you how to fix the missed schedule post error in WordPress.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Missed Schedule fix failed posts plugin. Thankfully, it is very easy to setup considering there are no settings to configure in the plugin.
The way how this plugin works is that it looks for posts that have missed their scheduled time. If WP Missed schedule finds a post that missed it’s schedule, then it will publish them correctly. To save resources on your server, it does this every 5 minutes and fixes 5 items in each cycle.
Recently some of our readers told us that schedule post feature is not working for them. Upon further research, we found that there are also some complaints about missing schedule posts and schedule post errors in the WordPress Trac. We found that it is actually an issue with WordPress 3.5. It is planned to be patched in the next security release 3.5.1.
You are probably wondering if this issue is new to WordPress 3.5, then how come the plugin has 37,000+ downloads? Well, the plugin has been around for some time now because this issue is not just with WordPress 3.5. It happens when your server configuration does not play nice with the default WP Cron. However, a group of folks are affected by this bug in WordPress 3.5 which should be fixed in version 3.5.1. For others having this issue, it is probably a web hosting issue.
Did you get affected by this issue? If so, then hopefully this solution fixed the problem. If you are still having the problem, or you found another fix, then please let us know in the comments below.
I used this plugin and it definitely helped publish posts that missed schedule, but now I am experiencing an issue where a post that missed and got published still shows up as a “Missed Schedule” post in the WordPress admin.
I have a problem that my scheduled gif image posts dont have thumbnails when I use this plugin.
That’s weird. We haven’t encountered this problem.
My 3.5 and 3.5 has missed both scheduled posts and it also fails to run scheduled tasks like the automatic google drive backup that was working well before, or even other backups like ones to dropbox.
Also, certain scheduled tasks like security scans fail to initiate automatically.
Do you think this is all related? Nothing changed with 3.5.1. Would you consider doing a wordpress re-install? Thank you.
It could be related. We recommend asking your web hosting provider regarding this.
I can’t seem to find the Plugin even using the link above.
Great stuff. Yesterday this occurred to me and I was thinking was a isolated bug… Thanks for the tip
I’ve been using the scheduled post capability for well over a year now and never had a problem until 3 weeks ago, about the time I upgraded to 3.5. However, today the scheduling worked just fine. I’d don’t use scheduling for a lot of posts, so I think I’ll just wait for the 3.5.1 fix. But it’s good to know about the WP Missed Schedule plugin.
Thanks!
This problem has existed far before 3.5, but only on certain server configurations. This plugin is also a fix for all those users who have been having this WordPress missed schedule problem prior to 3.5
Thank you for this article. I actually didn’t realize I had a problem with WordPress post scheduling. My post didn’t go out as scheduled but being a newbie to WordPress I just thought it was an error on my part.
Sweet, hopefully there is a setting to change the cron not to run every 5, but something else. Five is too much for a blog that may only have one or two posts a day.