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 allows you to schedule blog posts to be published later.

However, you will have to manually schedule every post that you write according to your content calendar, which can be time-consuming.

By auto-scheduling your WordPress posts, you can use an automatic system with a fixed time to publish all your scheduled posts.

For example, if you have written 10 blog posts to be published the following month, then you can auto-schedule all the articles to go live in a random order on your preselected publication dates.

This way, you won’t have to manually schedule everything on your WordPress blog, helping you save time.

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.

Here, you need to check the ‘Scheduled’ box next to the ‘Statuses to display publish time’ option. You can also choose other publication statuses, 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 has now been scheduled and will be published on the future date and time that you chose in the settings earlier.

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 can help keep your site fresh, but simply posting more often isn’t enough to rank higher in search results. To get steady organic traffic, you’ll also need to optimize your content for search engines.

This will improve your content’s authority and reach, as well as make your blog posts more likely to appear on search results pages (SERPs).

To do this, you can use All in One SEO (AIOSEO), which is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It is used by over 3+ million users and is a comprehensive SEO toolkit that can help your website rank higher.

We have been using it at WPBeginner to improve our site traffic and have seen great results. For details, see our AIOSEO review.

It comes with features like a headline analyzer, Flesch reading score, SEO health check, XML sitemaps, and more to improve your content.

Plus, it offers schema markup like Article schema, FAQ schema, and How To schema to increase your visibility 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, readability, and title tags, making it the best writing assistant software on the market.

By using the tips suggested by AIOSEO, you can make your content more readable while at the same time optimizing it for search engines.

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

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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