Over the years, WordPress has emerged as the best platform for blogging. And why wouldn’t it be? After all, it offers a remarkable user experience along with boasting uncountable free themes and widgets. Moreover, editing content on a WordPress site is extremely easy.
Another crucial functionality that WordPress offers is the permission to change the publish date of a blog post. Yes, that is right! WordPress allows you to:
- Publish a particular post on the spot
- Set the post publish date to a future date
- Change the publish date of an uploaded post to a date and time in the past.
In this article, you will learn how to schedule a post to be published in the future and how to edit the publish date of a post that has already gone live. So, without any further ado, let’s jump right into it.
Post Scheduling Method #1: Through the Publish Panel
So, have you written a blog post but would instead publish it at a later date or time? Well, you can always save the draft and come back to it when it’s time to post. However, it’s a human tendency to forget things. Luckily, WordPress offers a quick and easy way for you to set the publish date and time of a blog post. How? Let’s list down the steps:
- Sign in to your WordPress site dashboard by entering the username and password.
- Locate “Posts” on the menu on the left, and from there, access “All Posts”.
- Click on the title of the post that needs a date-change and enable the edit mode.
- Head over to the menu on the top right, access “Post,” expand “Status Visibility,” and click on “Immediately” written next to “Publish”.
5. Upon clicking “Immediately,” a calendar would pop up asking you to set a definite time and date for the post in question to go live. Simply enter the desired time and select your preferred post publish date.
6. Click on the “Publish” button at the top to finalize the changes.
The method explained above aids you in editing the publish date of a post and that of a page.
Post Scheduling Method #2: Quick Edit
More options are always welcome. To schedule the publish date of a blog post, you can try implementing the following steps:
1.Sign in to your WordPress site dashboard by entering the username and password.
2. Locate “Posts” on the menu on the left, and from there, access “All Posts”.
3. Place your cursor (DO NOT CLICK) over the post title that requires a date-change.
4. Upon placing the cursor over the post title, several options would appear under it. One of those options will be “Quick Edit”. Click on it.
5. Select the desired date and time and click on the “Update” button situated at the Quick Edit panel’s bottom-right section.
Changing the Post Publish Date of a Published Post
Scheduling a post’s publish date isn’t a complicated task by any means. However, do you know that WordPress also allows you to select a date and time in the past? Well, now you do!
To edit the publish date of a post that is already live on your WordPress site, perform the steps below:
- Sign in to your WordPress site dashboard by entering the username and password.
- Locate “Posts” on the menu on the left, and from there, access “All Posts”.
- Fetch all the “Published” posts.
- Click on the title of the post that needs a date-change to enable the edit mode.
- Head over to the menu on the top right, access “Post,” expand “Status Visibility,” and click on the Date & Time mentioned next to “Publish”.
- Upon clicking on the date and time, a calendar would pop up asking you to edit the publish date and time. Simply enter the desired time and select your preferred post publish date.
7. Simply click on the “Update” button at the top to finalize the changes.
Why Would You Feel the Need to Change the Publish Date of a WordPress Blog Post?
Now that you know how to change the date of a post, let’s discuss in which cases would it prove to be helpful:
1. Revising the publish date can make a post appear as a recent one. For example, imagine that you wrote a post a couple of months ago on a trend that faded away fairly quickly. However, now, that trend is back in style, and you believe your post could educate people about it.
But who would like to read a months-old post when there is fresh content available, right? This is where changing the publish date can prove to be valuable.
2. Scheduling a post to be published in the future saves you the trouble of remembering the time and date on which a post needs to go live.
3. Have you published a post recently but don’t consider it worthy enough to be shown on the first page? Just change its publish date to an earlier one.
Conclusion
To say that WordPress has made blogging easy would be an understatement. This open-source content management system is loaded with exciting features and functionalities. One of these functionalities allows site administrators to change a post’s publish date to a past or future date.
And if you are wondering, editing the post publish date doesn’t negatively affect SEO. In fact, a date change accompanied by some quality edits in the content can end up improving the SEO.
Have any questions about the topic in question? Comment below!
