Scheduled posts in WordPress are posts that are scheduled to appear at a future time, this feature is widely used as users may write multiple posts at once and may want to pace them out to get better readership.
For example on my personal blog there are multiple authors, so we schedule our posts and leave a two hour or more time gap between posts.
Do you use this feature for your blog? Do let us know by taking part in this short poll.
It would also be interesting to know why or why you don’t use this feature.
The main reason I schedule posts is to optimize when my audience will see them. If I were to post at 11pm, a lot of people who find my posts via a “river of news” feed reader or through the WordPress Dashboard (via Planet WordPress) might miss it due to newer articles pushing it out of view.
So I generally schedule my posts for early in the morning, and when possible, early in the work-week. There are exceptions, of course. When I have the opportunity to post more frequently, I tend not to worry about scheduling as much. Though I might queue up several drafts, then schedule them to trickle out over time, so they don’t all get clumped together.
I use scheduled posts regulary when I have more than one thing to post on a single day.
I run a photo blog and I (try to) upload one good photograph every day. If I know I’m going to be away for a while I use Scheduled Posts to get ahead of the game.
Chris
Same as Dougal. I tend to write a lot of posts at weird hours when people may not see them.
Especially early in my blogging time, I also used it as a way to figure out when people were reading.
I use this a LOT! Mostly for blogs where I’ll write a week’s worth of posts at one go and then spread them out one or two a day with scheduling; sometimes for press-release things that are embargoed until a certain time; less often for posts that I think I’ve finished writing but am not 100% happy with, so that I can give myself a couple of hours to possibly come back and edit if necessary. I think it’s one of the most useful features WP has.
I use this with 99% of the posts that I publish. I have many International readers so morning in the States means nothing to those guys. I publish at 12:01AM for statistical analysis reasons only and I want to make sure it goes out at the right time even if I finish a post hours or a day in advance.
I’ve used this when I get inspired enough to write several posts in a sitting. I then schedule them to pace the updates to my blog. Blog updates seem to improve search engine traffic, so I think it’s better to post single posts often rather than letting out a shotgun blast of posts at once. If you write several posts every day this may not make much difference, but if you only post a few times a week it’s better to space them out.
Sometimes,I wrote 5 posts or more in a day, but I want to publish a post everyday, so I have to use the scheduled post feature.
I use this pretty often to give me a buffer to work with. Sometimes I get busy for a week and this way during the week, posts still come out every other day or so.
I just with there were better ways for rescheduling, for example, bumping a post to the top of the queue.
I use this feature to write post when I have time and then can scheule them at different times. Very useful feature.
On one of my WP blogs, I do daily eye candy posts from my design team. I generally load these up two or three weeks worth at a time, and schedule them to drop in the wee hours daily. Without this feature, I doubt I’d be able to do the daily thing.
I was thinking on using it, since I restarted posting and I don’t want a bunch of posts at the same time and then a lot of time without posts. But I didn’t use it yet, maybe in later posts
I’m never able to write enough posts to give me any kind of buffer, so I can’t schedule posts to be published when I’m off doing something else – since there are no posts to be published. I generally just tend to post my posts right after writing them. I haven’t really seen any difference in traffic regardless of when I’m posting, so it doesn’t matter much to me.
I use it when I fall behind in posting to certain categories.
For example, right now I’m trying to get back to real time/same day photos of our daughter, but have a six week backlog of pictures to clear first. I’ll try and write five or six posts a night, and just post date them w/two per day.
The idea being that some family members who don’t notice/remember the ‘older posts’ link won’t miss photos when they slip to the second page (obviously if I did a couple of huge batches of posts, some would slip straight away), and also to try and get them into the habit of visiting regularly 🙂
If i know i’m going to be posting alot of stuff over the day and its not really time sensitive, i’ll stagger them across the day rather than dump it all out at once.
yeah, sometimes if i need to go to outside of my city, and take for more than a week, i do schedule post, really this feature very help me, so my blog will keep up to date, especially for search engine 😉
No, I hate it and wish it could be switched off!
The reason is I don’t use my site as a journal, but a chronological organised report of events with my photographs. I know planned events in the future and would already have them published to announce them, changing the posting once the event took place and add my pictures to it.
At the moment you cannot publish future dates, which should be an option.
BTW if anyone knows a plugin (which works with latest version WordPress) to do this, please let me know!
I use it quite regularly but have noticed a lot of them missing their scheduled publication in WP 2.8.1 – for me 2.8.2 fixed that on all of my sites.
The scheduled publication of posts hasn’t worked on my blog for some time and apparently I’m not alone with this problem. I would dearly love to use it as I would love to be able to publish posts when away from internet access but until the problem with wordpress has been solved I won’t be able to use this great feature. I really hope they sort it out soon.
we use it differently from y’all. we have a magazine format blog, with multiple authors who post to several different categories. every day, one of those posts becomes the “feature” story with a feature slot on the main page. we schedule the features several days in advance, although we do sometimes push the schedule back when one of our writers posts something very timely.
for this process, we use the duplicate post plugin. the downside to that is we lose the comments that the post engenders in its regular spot since the version that goes up in the feature slot is technically a new post.
we’d love to find a way to schedule a post to go into the feature slot without losing its slot in the regular category or to duplicate a post and bring the comments along with it.
there are days when i can just do post after post but i dont want spam the posts one after another so i spread my post up using the scheduled post function. There are also some announcements i do on my blog that i schedule it to post on X days , in case i have no time to do it on the day itself.
I run a band site. When the band is on the road I set up daily posts with show information in advance.
I do scheduled post when I plan to travel to another city.
Regards
We use it all the time because it allows you to set up a website without having to come back and do regular updates every month. It’s one of the many reasons I love wordpress.
I frequently use scheduled posts. But my main concern is future posted articles can miss schedule.
I have run into this as well. Has to be a bug in wp-cron or related. I was reading through your post and the solutions people suggested. This is going to take some looking into but I dont think we need to use third party plugins to get the future posts to work right.
I use it to have one new post every few days rather than having too many posts on the same day, especially as I don’t get publishable photographs every day.
Plus, I like collecting interesting links for a week or so until I post them.
yeap, i use that, but it works just sometimes
While I am aware of this feature, I haven’t seen the need for it quite yet as I don’t have content to push through from time to time.
I run a band site. When the band is on the road I set up daily posts with show information in advance.
Read more: http://weblogtoolscollection.c.....z0N07piJNk
I try to blog at least once every day. Sometimes, when I am traveling, for example, it can be difficult to fit it in and I don’t want to let my readers down. So I will scedule a post, just in case.
One has to be careful using this feature though, as I pointed out here: http://6000.co.za/2009/01/22/quote-of-the-day/
I use it quite a bit. I sometimes get bursts of inspiration and bang out 2 or 3 posts at once, but I like them to appear with some separation – at least a few hours, sometimes a few days. Or if I’m writing about something that I have strong emotions about, I’ll schedule it several days into the future so I have time to re-read it when I’m feeling less empassioned, so I can better-judge if the post is acceptable.
I just used this feature, for the first time, last week. I had published a press “pre-release” for WOT (Web of Trust) and didn’t want the post to go live until just after the official press release. Worked like a charm!
The Scheduled Post feature was why I switched from MovableType to WP many years ago — MT had it too but WP was much better to use and to make changes once it was scheduled.
We manage dozens of sites and about 10-15 posts are scheduled on these sites each day (combined). We occassionals have problems with the schedules being missed, but it probably only happens on one site once every 6 months.
Bottom line:: this Scheduled Post is a GREAT feature!
Use all the time on my photo of the day site. Photos appear at one second after midnight. Seems to work 100% of the time.
I use it all the time, because when I write a post usually isn’t the best time for the audience to read it. Secondly, writing a blog means getting organized around topics & material and inevitably involves planning in advance.
I run a photography blog, so most of the items are not time-sensitive; they’re about photos on the site, travel photography tips, places to go etc. So I schedule those to appear over time.
For time-of-year items, like a post on how to photograph fireworks on 4th July, I also want to write in advance and post them at the right time. For the fireworks post, that might be at the end of June.
Finally, when I’m off on a photo trip in another time zone I don’t want to have to be logging in at exactly the right moment to post an article. Who would? I currently have about 20 future blog posts written and scheduled at the moment.
I use this, as I try to post on a Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday schedule. I write in advance, and then queue up my posts.
We make extensive use of Scheduled Posts.
We use WP as a CMS to run a professional local news website in a small county in Upstate NY (4000-5000 visits a day). We have two paid journalists (including me) who write the top news of the day but we also take community submissions, which (between news releases, obituaries and such) can total 30-40 a day.
We use Scheduled Posts to achieve two things:
1. Balance the load of new content. Using the scheduling tool allows us to make that content spread out over time, so that most community content gets some “face time” on our home page, where 40-50% of all traffic goes.
2. We use it to help us appear larger than we are. Using Scheduled Posts allows us to write several stories at once but roll them out throughout the day, keeping the main content channel of the site fresher than it would be otherwise.
It’s a valuable part of the WP toolkit.
Scheduled Posts is a savior for my group blog. Writers can create their Feature post whenever they like and it helps remove any pressure for a deadline.
I have never tried this feature. However it is always useful. Will be using it from now onwards. Thanks.
Every Sunday, I schedule the week’s posts. Since I write an automotive blog, there isn’t very much news that comes up that’s time-sensitive so I can plan posts out ahead of time fairly extensively. I don’t always have time to log in during the week, so scheduling is a huge advantage for me.