Schedule Your WordPress Posts in Bulk

One thing you’ll notice once you start getting the hang of WordPress is that it’s rather time consuming to open up your website and schedule a new blog post on a daily basis. This is quite similar to social media, where you waste valuable time changing your mentality and work focus to open up Facebook, Twitter, or another platform to post a new status update. Not to mention, you have to hone your focus to start looking for a new idea to post, which takes up even more time.

With the above in mind, the best way to manage your time with both social media and blog posts is to pick a day throughout the week and schedule everything for the coming days. Some people plan out their blog posts for the entire week, while others look further into the coming months. You’ll soon start to notice that since you remain focused on a single task of posting to your blog, you don’t waste any time booting up a new browser window or punching in your login credentials every time.

You also get the creative juices flowing during that single posting period, making it beneficial to schedule your WordPress posts in bulk. But how do you do it? It’s actually a piece of cake, and in this post, I’m going to show you how!

How to Schedule Your WordPress Posts in Bulk

Let’s say you (or your writer(s)) wrote five or six blog posts for the coming week. You know that the posts are edited and ready for publication, but you don’t want to open up every single post to click on the Schedule button. Yes, we all know that you can schedule a single post in WordPress, but what about taking a bunch of those draft posts and scheduling them all for future publication in one fell swoop?

While you can always choose to modify some code to make this happen, it’s far easier to use a plugin, which is exactly what we’re going to do.

Step 1: Install the Drafts Scheduler Plugin

Login to your WordPress account and go to the Plugins tab on the left hand side to search for plugins. Search for Drafts Scheduler, install it on your site, and click the Activate button. Once the plugin is all setup, click on the Posts tab on the left hand side of your Dashboard. Click on this button and it will reveal a Draft Scheduler option below. Click on this to open up all of your options.

Step 2: Choose Your Post Type and Start Date

The first part of actually scheduling your posts is selecting a post type to schedule. Go to the area that says Post Type to Schedule, and click on the dropdown menu. This gives you items to choose from like Posts, Pages, and whatever else you may have on your website (such as coupons and invoices). Pick whichever one applies to you (almost certainly Posts).

The Schedule Start Date area gives you a nice little calendar that enables you to choose when to start posting your articles. This calendar is strictly for designating the first day you want to start posts being published. For example, if you choose today, then the first post will get published at midnight. After that date, all the other posts will go out depending on the next steps you take.

Step 3: Setup Your WordPress Post Order and Intervals

Now that you have the first day figured out, you can go ahead and indicate your posting order. Since your posts are all stacked up in your WordPress dashboard, you may want to send them out randomly or put them in a sequential order.

Go to the Posting Order section and select which option you want. The random option grabs a random post (as you would expect) and schedules it to go out next. The sequential option sends the posts out depending on how old they are.

The Post Interval item is all about how much time you want to put in between the posts that you schedule. So, do you want one post to be scheduled every day? Would you rather one post goes out every eight hours? Specify what you want your post interval to be, test it out in the coming days, and modify it if you need to.

The final option is available as an alternative to the interval posting. Choose the Post Randomlyitem if you want the system to surprise you with the post order. Keep in mind that it still uses your initial start date, but all of the posts are scattered throughout a certain time period. Go in there and set that time frame so you know when the posts start and end. This way, you can go back in and schedule the next round when the cycle is finished.

Click on the Schedule Drafts button at the bottom to complete the process. Keep in mind that this takes all the posts that you have filed as Drafts, so if you have a random post that you never want to go out, delete it completely from the system.

Step 4: Make Sure Everything is Working Properly

While Drafts Scheduler has some positive reviews, and I’ve used it in the past with no problems, it does have some quirks.

With that in mind, be sure to check in on Drafts Scheduler’s performance over the first few days you’re using it. Monitor how long it takes the plugin to serve up your scheduled posts, because you might notice something wrong with the interval times or maybe even the start or end dates.

I would recommend checking in on every post, at least for the first round, to see if it works properly on your site. There could also be another plugin that interferes with the functionality of this plugin, so every site is different.

Step 5: Keep Adding Posts to the Schedule

From here on out you no longer have to mess with the plugin anymore. As long as the plugin is running you can keep adding your posts to the draft queue and they will get placed into the scheduling system. So, in a sense, you never have to schedule a post on your blog again. Not only are you cutting down time by scheduling your posts, but you don’t even have to work on the bulk scheduling process anymore.

How to Undo or Modify Your Schedule

If for some reason you want to modify the schedule or completely disable it, simply go to the main plugin page that we looked at before and click on the Undo Schedule button. This removes all the scheduling settings you made before and wipes the slate clean. I would recommend hitting this button whenever you want to make changes to the schedule, so something doesn’t go out by accident while you are modifying the schedule.

As a note, remember that you no longer have to schedule your posts manually, so don’t click on the Publish or Schedule buttons after you write something. Simply save the posts and let the plugin work its magic.

Conclusion

That’s it for learning how to schedule your WordPress posts in bulk. Share your thoughts in the comments section below if you have any questions about the process or if you think there are some easier ways to go about scheduling in WordPress.