This is post #10 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.

Sometimes you won’t finish a post in one sitting. In those instances, you can simply save a draft of your post. To save your work for later, simply click on the Save Draft button in the upper right hand corner of the Add New Post screen.

Of course, you can also save a draft even if your post is finished, but you don’t want it up on your website just yet. Maybe your trying to control the timing of an announcement, or perhaps you’re writing some posts in advance. Saving a draft will work well for these scenarios, but WordPress goes one step further and allows you to schedule your post for publication at a later date. This way you can “set it and forget it” rather than having to remember to come back and hit the Publish button. You can even set the exact time you want your post to be published.

In the Publish box, simply click the Edit link right next to where it says Publish Immediately and type in the date and time you’d like your post to “go live.”

After you hit the Ok button, you’ll notice that the Publish button changes to read Schedule.

Click the Schedule button and your post will be published at the date and time you set.

Saving for a rainy day

Stockpiling posts is a great strategy for managing the workload for your website. Trying to keep up with a writing schedule can be difficult to juggle along with all your other tasks. Taking the time to write a bunch of posts at once and then dole them out over time can help to alleviate a lot of the stress of publishing. Regular updates will still require discipline, but having a few posts in the bank can really help keep things manageable.

Why are regular updates important?

Search engines learn your patterns and adjust their visits to your website accordingly. Training the search engine to come back on a regular basis will help ensure that your new content is quickly indexed and available for search results.

Users will also visit your site more frequently (or better yet subscribe – more on this later) if the content is updated regularly. There can be a better sense of the value proposition for your readers (“Hey look, at this site I get an interesting article about dog grooming every Friday!”), and a better sense that there are real humans behind the curtain.

This is post #10 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.