Overview
It’s simple to schedule a WordPress article in advance. You finish editing, set a deadline, and then you’re free to pursue other interests. The issue is that WordPress occasionally fails to publish certain planned posts, causing your editorial calendar to become messed up.
A “cron” is the core functionality that allows you to schedule posts in WordPress, and it doesn’t always work as planned. However, there are a few steps you may take to avoid this situation in the future.
In this post, we’ll teach you how to identify a missed schedule issue and delve deeper into why it occurs. Then we’ll go over two options for resolving the issue so that your website never fails you again when you plan a post. Let’s get started!
What Is the Missed Schedule Error in WordPress?
When you finish a new WordPress post, you have a few options for what to do next. You can save it as a draft, publish it immediately, or schedule it for a later time.
The entire procedure usually goes off without a hitch. When the deadline approaches, WordPress checks to see whether any posts are due for publishing. If there are any, it goes ahead and publishes them. Meanwhile, you may relax and concentrate on other elements of your website and business.
However, WordPress may miss the publication date you specify on occasion. If you check your Posts tab when this happens, you’ll get an error like this:
Error: WordPress Schedule Was Missed
You may always go back into those troublesome postings and manually publish them. When a scheduled post mistake occurs, however, WordPress does not notify you. This means that if you want to avoid any issues, you’ll have to double-check to see if your posts went live at the times you specified, which negates the whole point of scheduling them ahead of time.
Why the WordPress Missed Schedule Error Happens
Cron jobs are used by WordPress to schedule tasks that must be completed at certain times. These ‘crons,’ also known as’schedulers,’ are used in UNIX-based systems for a variety of tasks. For example, you could use a cron to run a command or a script, or to publish a post, like WordPress does.
The issue with WordPress crons is that they aren’t true crons in the traditional sense. Because many web providers don’t give users access to server settings, you won’t be able to set your crons to run at the system level. WordPress gets around this restriction by employing simulated crons. WordPress uses user visits to activate these bogus crons, rather than having them run at a defined interval.
In other words, the Content Management System (CMS) checks each time a user visits your website to determine whether there are any pending cron jobs that need to be done. This is a great method, but it has one obvious drawback: if your website doesn’t receive any visitors at the correct moment, the CMS will fail to publish your posts as intended. That’s when the dreaded missed schedule error will show up.
Even if your site has a steady stream of traffic, you’re not completely immune to the WordPress missed schedule issue. If your website stays down for an extended period of time, or if you utilize a caching plugin, your WordPress crons may fail to run as expected.
How to Fix the WordPress Missed Schedule Error (2 Methods)
When it comes to WordPress issues, this one is rather simple to fix. In the sections that follow, we’ll look at two approaches for preventing missed posts: one that uses a plugin and the other that relies on your server.
1. Install and activate the Scheduled Post Trigger Plugin.
In an ideal world, WordPress would check for missed post publication dates on a regular basis and take care of them for you. Unfortunately, that isn’t a feature that comes standard with the CMS. However, with the correct plugin, you can easily add this type of functionality, and that’s where Scheduled Post Trigger comes in:
The plugin is triggered by scheduled postings.
This plugin works by checking to see if WordPress has missed any scheduled publication dates recently each time someone visits your website. If it discovers any instances of the missing schedule error, it immediately publishes those posts.
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To put it another way, the plugin works by adding a cron job to your website that checks for missed cron jobs. This method may appear repetitious at first, but it is effective. Furthermore, the plugin does not require any extra settings and will begin working as soon as you install and activate it.
2. Directly Manage Cron Jobs Through Your Server
You can arrange cron tasks to execute at that level if your hosting plan gives you access to your server’s settings. To make this strategy work, you must first disable WordPress crons to avoid conflicts.
To do so, use a client like FileZilla to connect to your website via FTP. Look inside your root folder for the wp-config.php file:
file wp-config.php
Select View/Edit from the context menu when you right-click on the file. Before the end of the file, add the following line of code:
if (‘DISABLE WP CRON’, true); if (‘DISABLE WP CRON’, true); if (‘DIS
That’s everything for the first stage. Save the modifications to your wp-config.php file. The next step is to set up manual crons on your server, which you can usually do using your hosting control panel.
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If you have access to cPanel, for example, there should be a Cron Jobs option under one of its tabs:
cPanel-based cron jobs
You can quickly schedule new cron jobs to run at regular intervals with this program. Any intervals more than five minutes are considered overkill, and a cron job running at those times will burden your server needlessly.
Keep in mind that, while your web host can assist you in scheduling crons at the server level, you will still need to manually select which jobs to run. If you want to manually configure your crons, you’ll need to brush up on your UNIX commands.
Another option is to utilize a web hosting company that manages crons for you.
We configure your WordPress cron tasks at Kinsta to execute at a system level with 15-minute intervals. 15-minute intervals will get the job done in the great majority of cases. If you need it, you may always contact support and request that the interval be lowered to five minutes.
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Summary
Most WordPress users rely on the ability to schedule posts. You won’t have to set reminders to manually publish posts thanks to this simple feature. Instead, WordPress (or at least it should) takes care of it for you. However, if the linked cron job fails to run, your article may not see the light of day until you manually publish it.
The WordPress missed schedule error can be fixed in two ways. You can do the following:
Use the plugin Scheduled Post Trigger.
Cron tasks can be managed directly from your server.
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