Do Your Posts Ever Show "Missed Schedule"?

bybryonbrewer

10.5K followers

Updated 11 years ago

I've been scheduling posts a lot more recently, I find it helps me to just focus on one site for a few days at the beginning or end of the month, and schedule those posts to publish throughout the month.

It leaves me more time to get on with other things, and also keeps me focused when doing the actual writing.

One of the things that makes WordPress so convenient is the ability to schedule the exact time and date that your post will go live, and you can even use plugins to link your site's RSS feed with social networks, so your G+ and FB accounts will also make a post to match your site's post.

The thing is though, on two or three occasions I've checked up on a site and thought "That's strange, shouldn't it have published something yesterday?" only to log in and see it saying "Missed schedule".

This is usually fixed by just editing the schedule date and publishing it immediately.

However in one case, I couldn't publish it immediately, because another post had just published, so I re-scheduled it for the next day and that too missed its schedule.

90% of my posts will publish without issue, but I was wondering if anyone else had noticed this? Do your posts ever miss their schedule? Is there something that makes a post more likely to "misfire" or is it just random?

Cheers

EDIT: @RICH. Came up with the answer (no surprise there).

"Sometimes you scheduled posts fail to post on time or are missed completely. There are technical reasons for this, most likely being that the wp-cron.php execution is taking too long to complete and is never successfully publishing your posts. The fact wp-cron.php takes a while couple be many reasons but is likely due to the number of tasks it is performing. If you are running plugins that frequently do tasks like Google Analytics this is often the cause."