WordPress’s system is designed so that it will publish a scheduled blog post if someone visits your website within a couple of minutes of your scheduled post date and time. This is for efficiency reasons, so that resources aren’t being wasted to check if you have any scheduled posts every minute of every day.
For this reason, if you don’t get much traffic to your website, or you schedule posts at a time when visitors are unlikely to be on your site (for example on your quietest traffic days, or very early/late in the day for your main audience), your post may fail to publish at the time you scheduled.
There are a couple of things you can do to help your scheduled posts publish:
Install a plugin
There are several free missed schedule plugins that will check to see if a post should have been published at a past date and time, and try to publish it again.
You can search the plugin directory for “missed schedule” straight from your WordPress Dashboard by going to Plugins > Add New and using the search. You’ll want to make sure the plugin you choose has good reviews and has been updated within the last year.
Set up a cron job on the server
This will introduce more regular checks to make it more likely your post will publish at the specified time you’ve scheduled. Please raise a support ticket and we’ll get that sorted out for you.
Please note that while these solutions will help create a higher success rate for your scheduled posts, there are no guarantees of every blog post you schedule being published automatically at the time you specify. Unfortunately, this is due to how WordPress itself is constructed and is beyond our control!
If it’s essential to you that a post is published at a specific date and time, the only way to guarantee it is to hit publish on it yourself instead of scheduling it.
