For the past 2 months I have had a serious issue on my WordPress powered personal site. Every single time I would schedule a post, it would miss posting the article at the right time, sometimes never posting it. I had to figure out how to stop missing scheduled posts.
It took me a little while to figure out what was going on and I don’t think it was an issue just for my site has ChurchMag has struggled with this as well. I reached out to some WordPress Church-friendly Twitter friends and they suggested using a plugin called wp-missed-schedule.
I installed the plugin a day before one of my scheduled posts was to go live and instantly things work back up and running perfectly. Perfect fix.
The guys over at WP Church Team that recommended the plugin also noted Tom McFarlin, former ChurchMag member and friend of the site, had written a blog article about this. Apparently this is a consistent issue for more than just myself for a developer to write an article about it. Whether it is, as Tom calls it, “a surprising lack of clarity around the topic” or simplifying the issue to the question of “what would be the purpose of scheduling a job if it had to run manually?” that is inherent to the issue of the WordPress cron system failing.
It’s Frustrating for Smaller Sites
I know that there’s a whole program setup for how to utilize WordPress which involves someone needing to come to view your website, a serious issue for smaller sites. But when WordPress is unable to post your articles on time and really causes a lot of significant issues that are exasperated with further reducing your traffic.
This is one of those downsides of using free software.
But we have to keep the costs down and for the most part WordPress is great. This though can’t happen.
Thank Goodness I Had Someone. Do You?
It was great to be able to reach out to someone that might have been able to have a solution. For me, this time it worked and I am always encouraged by people whenever they help. You should have some of those people in your life when you need help who will help do the research when you don’t know where to turn.
You can make the best content in the world, have the best content in the world with the best SEO, but if you don’t have a platform that will publish your content, what’s the point?
And really WorPress is supposed to make it so that you don’t have to work as hard publishing an article at the right time because you have that schedule feature. But I find myself having to work hard not only to make sure they do is scheduled at the right time, but also making sure to actually posted.
Here’s hoping WordPress resolves this and that you do not experience trivial things that stop your content from getting posted.
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