How to Schedule Post and Page Updates in WordPress

In this text and video Quick Guide, we’ll cover how to schedule a post update or a page update, so that your scheduled post revision is automatically set to go live at a particular time.

Why You’d Want to Schedule Post or Page Updates

Being able to schedule revisions to post or page content has a lot of possible use cases. For example:

• You may want the copy on one of your site’s pages to automatically update when a sale starts on December 1. Rather than needing to be in WordPress on December 1 itself, you can simply schedule the change to auto-propagate at that time.
• Update conference registration pages to show “Registration Closed” after the deadline passes.
• Switch product pages from “Pre-order” to “Now Available” on launch day

You get the idea…

How to Schedule Updates for WordPress Posts and Pages

Scheduled updates and revisions for posts, pages, and custom post types aren’t an out-of-the-box feature of WordPress. We’ll need the PublishPress Revisions plugin to make it possible.

1. First, install the PublishPress Revisions plugin. To do that, you’ll go to “Plugins > Add New” and search for “publishpress revisions.” When you find it, click on the “Install” button. Wait for the plugin to install and then click “Activate”.
2. Find the post you’d like to schedule a revision for and click Edit to open the WordPress editor.
3. Click the New Revision button in the Post settings sidebar. This will create a new revision post.
4. Next, click on the Edit Revision button that’s now available. This will open a new window with the revision editor.
5. In the editor, make the desired changes to the post.
6. Now that you’ve made your changes, go to the Post settings sidebar and change the Publish date and time for the revision post to when you want your revision to go live.
7. To proceed, you’ll need to save your revision. Do that by clicking on the Save Draft button.
8. The Schedule button now becomes available. Click on that button and your revision will be scheduled.

You can now see your revision and all other scheduled revisions in the Revisions Queue dashboard under the Revisions menu.

On the whole, PublishPress Revisions is one of the most confusing plugins I’ve tried to use. But it’s also one of the more complex topics I’ve tried to use a plugin to help with. I hope that you put in the time to get the hang of it and find it valuable when you do.

More on Scheduling Changes in WordPress

If you’re interested in publishing WordPress changes on a schedule, check out our article on how to schedule design changes to your site from the WordPress Customizer. This would let you, for example, automatically change your site’s color scheme on the first day of summer.

Thanks for reading!