At some point during the past 10 years, WordPress became a website CMS tool first, and a blogging platform second. While the core features and functions don’t yet reflect this, plug-ins carry the weight.

In my daily tasks of managing websites and marketing programs, one challenge I’m tasked with is timing updates to client websites. Example: My client needs to update a single Promotions page on their website each month with a new promotion. Recently, I grew tired of setting reminders to update pages and looked for a solution. As with almost everything WordPress related, I found a free solution quickly.

Tao Schedule Update

Plugin Which Allows Page Update Delays

Tao Schedule Update is a free and simple WordPress plugin which allows you to edit a page and then set a date/time for the update to push live. Really simple, something that (in my opinion) wordpress should build into core, and really useful. In short, here’s how it works.

  1. It creates a clone of your page/post which reflects your updates
  2. When the set date/time occurs, it deletes your old page/post and pushes your new updated page/post live on the same URL.

Really simple, really awesome for any situations where page/post updates are time sensitive.

How To Use Tao Schedule Update

Step 1: Install TAO Schedule Update

Go to the Tao Schedule Update plugin page, download the plug-in and install as you would any other plugin. After installation, make sure you activate the plugin.

Step 2: Find the Page/Post You’d Like to Schedule a Change To

Next, go to the main pages or posts section of WordPress admin, hover over the page/page which you’d like to schedule a change to and click, Schedule Update.

Step 3: Make and Schedule Your Page/Post Changes

The step is simple. Make edits to the clones page/post as you would usually do and in the right-hand navigation, choose the date/time which you’d like the change to go-live.

If you want to change the update which you’ve scheduled, you can easily do so by accessing it in the main Pages or Posts screen. The scheduled version always appears as a child Page/Post to the original.

That’s all there is to it. Scheduling wordpress page/post changes is really easy with this free plugin, Tao Schedule Update.

Benefits of Scheduling Page and Posts Updates

From the marketing side of things, there are a ton of uses for Scheduling Page and Post Updates. In most cases, the theme is simple- we don’t want to have to physically make the changes on the day which we’d like them to go-live because we’re either not in the office or don’t want to complicate our schedules!

  1. Holidays: For upcoming holidays, we change homepage creatives, promotion creatives, etc. and don’t want them to go-live until a specific date.
  2. Email marketing timing: Let’s say you have a marketing email scheduled for Saturday and want the homepage to reflect your promotion. Scheduling your page update is a great way to do this.
  3. Vacation: Planning a sweet vaca in the Bahamas? No problem, pre-schedule any updates needed before you go and your boss and/or clients will think you’re hard at work in the office.

Questions, comments, feedback? Use comments below!

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