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.
Video Tutorial
If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Missed Schedule fix failed posts plugin. The plugin is available on GitHub, you may want to see our guide on how to how to install WordPress plugins from GitHub.
How WordPress Missed Schedule Plugin Works?
The plugin looks for posts that have missed their scheduled time. If it 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.
Thanks a lot for this post! The plugin works great and fixes the error
Hi, why is it that this error occurs? I was republishing a post and scheduled for a few minutes ahead – every time, it did not publish. I downloaded the plugin and it worked right away. Also… I will only need this once a week or so, should I just deactivate the plugin when I’m not using it? Thanks
Hi Natalie,
Yes, you can deactivate the plugin when not using it.
Learn much more from article, thank you
I have also having a post scheduling issue. I have a weekly program. My 89th show missed its schedule date. I have had scheduling issues since going ‘live’ in January of 2016! I have tried many things. I use the Advanced Cron Manager plugin. Today I need help again. Any thoughts?
Does anyone know how to get the WP Missed Schedule plugin from Github up into WordPress. I’m a beginner user but need to use this plugin and for the life of me, I can’t figure out where the file is on Github. When I got to this person GitHub site, and download the “zip”, it downloads a folder to my computer with a bunch of files in the folder, but none of them are a Zip file. There is two .php files and I”m not sure if I’m supposed to use them somehow. Please help! Thanks! And also, if someone knows of a better alternative to dealing with Missed Schedule let me know. I use GoDaddy Managed WordPress which has a caching issue that can’t be fixed and I don’t have access to create a cron job, so I have to find a workaround. Any help would be appreciated on either getting the WP Missed Schedule zip file and have directions how to do that and get it installed or another plugin suggestion. Thanks!
Sincerely,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
If you are using Windows, then you can right click on the folder and then select Send to > Compressed zip folder. If you are on Mac then right click and select Compress “wp-missed-schedule-master”. This will create a zip file for you and then you can install the plugin from WordPress admin area by visiting Plugins > Add New page and clicking on the Upload button.
I use a Mac and Is this a safe plugin to use? I just didn’t understand why they took it off of WordPress and put in in github?
Php file blocked by htaccess, it always blocks wp-cron.php too, So It should not run the cron job, It will be fixed after you add wp-cron.php again. (I had this issue and now it was be fixed)
This worked like a charm. Installed WP Missed Schedule and the missed post was posted immediately. Thank you!
WordPress 4.5.3 running
missed schedule
Is it me or is WordPress become more difficult to operate and less trust worthy?
We have updated the article with updated link for the plugin which is now available on GitHub only.
Has anyone found a more recent solution for this problem. The “WP Missed Schedule” plugin no longer exists, unfortunately, and I’ve tried every suggested fix I can find without any luck.
July 3 2016 – Having the same problem. Scheduled posts NEVER post on time. I always must force the post manually. Some have suggested shutting off all plugins but this seems like a drastic action. Apparently the plugin “WP Missed Schedule” is no longer available.
Hi,
I am using WordPress V4.5.2 and still having this problem with scheduled posts not getting published – this morning it published 3 of the 6 scheduled posts only.
The plugin you recommend is no longer in the repository it seems.
Do you have another recommendation?
Thanks,
Dale.
Yes, I am also facing this issue in Version 4.5.2
and above mentioned plugin is no more
Hi,
Is there a way to fix WITHOUT using any wordpress plugin???
Thx
Having this issue with the latest version of WordPress Free. Scheduled posts don’t actually post until I go onto the site. Comes up with a missed schedule message.
Worked for me, great! Thanks.
Is it possible to change the time between running the cron??
We have this problem even on WordPress 4.1. Our site is on AWS Beanstalk – maybe that is causing the Cron to stop working. Or maybe it is W3TC.
I hear you. We’re having this problem with 4.1.1. It’s such a nuisance. I guess we’ll have to give the plugin a try.
I think the issue may be W3TC. Scheduling on my website worked perfectly until I recently installed W3TC. Upon disabling the plugin, scheduling works perfectly again!
So it’s been a few days now and I have been monitoring the scheduling on my website without W3TC and everything continues to be running smoothly.
W3TC was definitely the culprit for my “missed schedule” errors. Now I just have to figure out why!!!!!
I found having object cache enabled was the culprit of me, disabling that and switching to database cache fixed it for me
We had this happen last week on WP 4.0. Why the heck can’t WP fix it? If they can identify a missed schedule, why can’t they include a mechanism to try again?
The scheduling task obviously runs regularly, so all it has to do is not only look for scheduled posts due, but missed ones, and post them all. QED?
Hey Syed, we are having the same problem on our news blog
Anyways I do not like to install the plugin to fix the issue. I think it is like building an other house while one is burning. I have not found the solution yet but I try to firefight the burning house and make in being comfortable and nice again rather than building up a small side-hut, for which i will not know if it is compatible with future wordpress releases.
In most cases it is usually a server configuration issue, if your web servers configuration does not play nice ith cron jobs then it is hard to fix without using the plugin.
Can you give an example of this… the “web servers configuration does not play nice ith cron jobs” line? It’s hard to truly understand what is going on to see if it can even be addressed.
Thanks!
Just noticed that if I schedule a post, then edit it, it appears as having “missed schedule” even if the scheduled date is a month in the future.
I don’t know if this will fix it, but I made that error go away by doing a quick edit and changing the time (even by a minute) on the schedule. Those posts now show as “Scheduled.”
We’ll see if they post on schedule or not – but the first one’s not due to kick off until April 1. (I have not installed this, or any other “fix” – just noticed this under All Posts.)
Thanks, will use it and see.
WP Missed Schedule making huge errorlog I dont recommend using this plugin. Some times it is getting loop and messing your vps
I say fix your server problem or get a stronger server-vps. This is my way. And I fix this problem with new vps.
Thanks so much for this, it was really frustrating to see that 3 posts were not published on time! Many thanks!
Paul
Thanks so much for this post! Really helped. Hopefully this gets fixed soon. I’m on 3.5.1 and am still having this issue.
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.