Posting consistently and frequently is important when it comes to building a blogging presence. The trouble is that you may not always be available at a certain time or seven days a week.
Scheduling posts in advance can give you more freedom in your work schedule and keep you from having to log in daily. With WordPress, it’s easy to automate the publishing time of posts to ensure that they go up when needed.
In this article, we will cover how to schedule and automate WordPress post publishing to save you time and ensure that your blog posts are consistent. Let’s take a look!
Why You May Want to Automate Your WordPress Blog Posts
Building an audience for your blog requires consistency. You can write from the heart and share your thoughts with the world, but if you want to gain a following and drive traffic, you need to publish on a consistent and predictable schedule.
However, manually publishing each post every time you have new content to share can be distracting and time-consuming. That’s why automating when your blog posts get published can be beneficial. It ensures that your content gets published on time with less manual effort so you can focus on other tasks.
Moreover, delivering new content on a predictable schedule creates a connection with your audience, since they’ll know exactly when to check in. This reliability can help gain your readers’ trust over time.
Furthermore, being dependable can help build your brand and earn trust from your audience.
In fact, studies show that trustworthy brands benefit from all sorts of perks that are well worth the effort. Customers are 90% more likely to recommend a trusted brand to friends and family, and 88% more likely to buy from them. 73% are even willing to pay more for a brand they trust. The good news is that you can easily start to build that trust by posting reliably on your blog.
Anyone can schedule their blog posts, but the ability to automate that schedule in WordPress is the real trick. Instead of logging in every time you want a new post to go up, you can trust an automated system to follow your schedule. Additionally, this leaves less space for human error. That way, you can focus on other areas of your business that need attention.
How to Schedule and Automate WordPress Blog Post Publishing (In 4 Steps)
Scheduling and automating your WordPress blog posts is actually quite simple. More challenging is planning what to post and when to publish it. Now, let’s dive into how to create a consistent and well-balanced posting schedule using automation.
Step 1: Decide How Often to Publish
Deciding how often you can or should post may take some trial and error. It may also depend on the type of blog or publication you are creating and your available resources. A one-person fashion blog, for example, will publish less than a major website with a full professional staff.
Plus, if you are just getting started, it may take some time to find your rhythm.
So, how often should you publish blog posts? There are no definite answers, but there are some good guidelines and useful statistics you can follow to find the right answer for you.
Here are some research findings from Orbit Media Studios, a marketing agency that conducts an annual survey of bloggers:
From this data, we see that half of all bloggers publish weekly or several times a month. Very few manage to publish every day. As professional marketer and blogger Barry Feldman says, “blog as often as you can post really great content.” Focusing on quality matters more than merely publishing a high volume of posts.
With this in mind, you would be wise to choose a specific time for daily posts. If you post weekly, post on the same day at the same time. If you post a few times throughout the week, choose a predictable schedule such as Tuesday afternoon, Thursday afternoon, and Saturday morning. Whatever you do, it is usually best to evenly distribute your posts and keep them consistent.
Step 2: Determine the Best Posting Time
While posting consistently is probably the most important factor, finding the best time to post can also have a big impact on a post’s reach. This again depends on your blog and your audience. Therefore, it may require some experimentation to find the optimal publishing time.
One way to do this is to monitor engagement when trying out different posting times. If you find that your audience is more receptive in the evening after work, or likes to check in first thing in the morning, you might want to cater your publishing times to their preferences.
This is precisely why automating posts can be so useful. When it comes down to it, your schedule may not match up with your audience’s. Moreover, unless you are a full-time blogger, you’ll likely have a day job that makes you unavailable at certain times. That means if your best posting times conflict with your work hours, you may often miss out.
To determine the best posting time, you can use analytics tools such as the Visitor Traffic Real Time Statistics plugin. This can help you skip the trial-and-error phase by showing you when your site receives the most traffic over time. You can even use this plugin to see an hourly overview of when your site’s traffic occurs, as well as what content attracts the most visitors.
Using this information, you can look for patterns and plan to post new content during popular time frames to maximize visitor engagement. If you don’t have enough historical data to suggest the best time, there are some general guidelines that can help you get started.
Step 3: Write Your Posts
Scheduling and automating WordPress posts provides you with a few advantages during the writing process. For starters, you can write your posts in advance, at any time, and schedule them whenever you please.
You can also use a calendar tool such as Trello’s Calendar Power-Up to organize your blog ideas and posting arrangements. This will help ensure that you’re publishing a healthy variety of fresh content. You can even integrate WordPress and Trello with Zapier to seamlessly manage your projects and schedules from one spot.
With Zapier, you can tie WordPress to Trello or Google Calendars, allowing you to truly automate your posting. Zapier allows these different tools to communicate, so when an event happens on your calendar, it can trigger an action in WordPress. An example of this would be triggering a post to publish in WordPress when a calendar event becomes active.
This allows you to see the larger picture, by giving you an overview of your posts for the entire week or month. It can help you maintain your focus and use a more consistent voice.
You may even want to practice batch content creation to boost your productivity. It can be more efficient to write multiple posts at once, as related ideas will be fresh in your mind and you can stay in your writer’s flow for longer. Best of all, this can enable you to actively choose when to work, instead of having your schedule controlled by your audience’s ideal reading times.
Step 4: Choose Your Posting Time via the Publish Options
Once a post is written, scheduling it in advance is very straightforward. If you open the post in your WordPress editor and check out the right-hand menu, you should see a section called Status & visibility under the Post options.
Within that section you can find the Publish setting. By default this is set to Immediately:
If you click on the Immediately button, a calendar will pop up that allows you to select when to publish the post. Simply choose the time and date you would like the post to go live, and you will see the settings change:
You should also notice that the Publish button in the top-right corner of the screen has now changed to Schedule:
This lets you know whether the post is scheduled to publish in the future or will immediately go live. Reviewing this setting is something you might want to add to your pre-publication checklist.
If this is your first time scheduling a post, you will be presented with a confirmation pop-up. However, you can easily turn off the pre-publish checks by deselecting the box at the bottom of the right-hand menu:
After you click on Schedule, you will receive another confirmation message letting you know that you’ve successfully scheduled the post. You can check on the status of all your scheduled posts by navigating to the Posts tab in your dashboard:
If you schedule a number of posts ahead of time, you can review the posting times here. You can also make changes to the posts or reschedule them. That’s all there is to it!
Now You’re Ready to Automate WordPress Post Publishing
Now that you know how to schedule and automate your WordPress blog posts, you can start planning a consistent and well-researched posting strategy. Figuring out when and how often to publish new content for your audience will help improve engagement and give your posts more traction.
To schedule a WordPress post, simply follow these steps:
- Decide on your posting frequency.
- Plan your posting schedule.
- Write your post.
- Select the posting time using the Publish settings.
It’s time to start blogging more efficiently and with less manual effort. Best of luck!
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