How to Auto-Schedule Your WordPress Blog Posts

Publishing content consistently is one of the best ways to grow your WordPress blog and keep your audience engaged. But manually hitting ‘Publish’ every time can be a hassle if you’re managing a busy content calendar.

While we manually schedule all posts on WPBeginner, many bloggers and businesses use auto-scheduling to streamline their workflows.

That’s because scheduling your posts in advance lets you plan ahead, stay organized, and make sure that your articles go live at the best times for engagement.

In this article, we will show you how to easily auto-schedule your WordPress blog posts.

Why Auto-Schedule WordPress Blog Posts?

By default, WordPress lets you schedule blog posts to be published later.

However, you still have to manually select the specific date and time for every article you write, which can be time-consuming.

Auto-scheduling streamlines this process. It allows you to set a consistent, default time of day for all your future publications. Once configured, you simply change a post’s status to ‘Scheduled’ without picking a time.

WordPress will then automatically place that post in the queue to be published on the next available calendar day at your default time.

This helps you maintain a predictable schedule and saves you from manually setting a time for each post.

Having said that, let’s take a look at how to easily auto-schedule your WordPress posts, step by step.

How to Auto-Schedule WordPress Blog Posts

You can easily auto-schedule your WordPress blog posts using the PublishPress Planner plugin. This free plugin lets you organize and schedule your WordPress content.

First, you need to install and activate the free PublishPress Planner plugin. For detailed instructions, see our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, visit the Planner » Settings page from the WordPress dashboard and switch to the ‘Content Calendar’ tab from the top.

On this tab, find the ‘Statuses to display publish time’ setting and check the box next to ‘Scheduled.’

You can also choose to display other statuses on your calendar, like draft or pending review, if you like.

Once you have done that, you must choose a time format for your post’s publication and then click on the field next to the ‘Default publish time for items created in the calendar’ option.

This will open a prompt on the screen where you can pick the specific time, hour, and minute for your scheduled posts to be published daily.

We recommend choosing a publishing time when your blog traffic usually increases. To determine the correct time to publish your blog posts, you may want to see our tutorial on the best time to publish a blog.

Finally, click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

Now, open the post you want to schedule on your WordPress blog in the block editor.

Here, you will see a ‘Post Status’ dropdown menu in the block panel on the right. Once you have completed your post, simply open this dropdown menu and select the ‘Scheduled’ option.

After that, click the Save as Scheduled button at the top of the screen to store your settings.

Your post is now scheduled. It will automatically be published on the next available calendar day at the default time you configured in the settings.

You can see all your published and scheduled posts by visiting the Planner » Content Calendar page from the WordPress admin sidebar.

Bonus: How to Increase WordPress Blog Traffic

Publishing new content regularly is a great start, but to get steady organic traffic, you also need to optimize your articles for search engines. This helps improve your content’s authority and makes it more likely to appear on search results pages.

To do this, we recommend All in One SEO (AIOSEO). It is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market, used by over 3 million professionals to rank higher in search results.

Our team switched to AIOSEO on WPBeginner for all our SEO needs, from managing sitemaps to adding schema markup.

You can learn more about why we switched from Yoast and see our complete AIOSEO review for a detailed look at its features.

It comes with powerful tools like a headline analyzer, a Flesch reading score, and XML sitemaps.

Plus, it lets you add advanced schema markup, like Article or How-to schema, to help your site stand out on Google.

AIOSEO provides suggestions on how to use active voice, insert transition words, and distribute subheadings better.

It also analyzes your blog posts for keyword density and readability, making it an incredibly powerful writing assistant for optimizing content for search engines.

For more information, you can see our guide on how to set up AIOSEO for WordPress correctly.

Frequently Asked Questions About Auto-Scheduling Posts

Here are some common questions we get about scheduling and automating WordPress content.

What is the difference between scheduling and auto-scheduling in WordPress?

By default, WordPress lets you manually schedule a specific publication date and time for each individual post. This is great for planning, but you have to set it for every article.

Auto-scheduling, using a plugin like PublishPress Planner, creates an automated system.

You set a recurring time slot, and any post you mark as ‘Scheduled’ will automatically be added to the queue to go live on the next available day at that time.

Can I auto-schedule posts in WordPress without a plugin?

No, WordPress does not have a built-in feature for auto-scheduling a queue of posts. You can only schedule posts one by one.

A plugin is required to create a content calendar that automatically publishes your scheduled drafts at a preset time.

Does scheduling blog posts affect SEO?

Scheduling posts does not directly impact your SEO rankings. However, it helps you maintain a consistent publishing schedule, which is a positive signal for search engines.

Publishing regularly at times when your audience is most active can also increase user engagement, which indirectly supports your SEO efforts.

What happens if a scheduled post fails to publish?

Sometimes, a WordPress cron job, which handles scheduled tasks, can miss a post. This is known as the “missed schedule” error.

If this happens, you can see our guide on how to fix the missed schedule post error to resolve the issue.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily auto-schedule your WordPress blog posts. You may also want to see our tutorial on how to avoid accidental publishing in WordPress and our guide on testing your site for updating to Gutenberg (block editor).

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