When I first switched to WordPress all of my scheduled posts missed their schedule and I know this isn’t an uncommon problem but thankfully there is a simple and free solution.
The first thing to do is go to ‘settings’ and make sure your blog is set to the right timezone. You might be scheduling posts for 8AM UK time but if your timezone is 5 hours behind UK time, then it will be posting 5 hours later than you’re expecting.
If that doesn’t work, you will need a plugin to do the job. There are a few available but the one I use is ‘WP Missed Schedule‘.
It’s simple to install and it didn’t ask me for any extra information; all I had to do was press a couple of buttons to install it.
WP Missed Schedule works by checking your site every few minutes and if it finds a post that has missed it’s schedule, it will post it. This means that your posts should never miss their schedule by more than a few minutes, rather than hours.
I’ve been using this plugin for the past couple of weeks and I’ve not had a single post miss schedule since installing it, so this plugin does the job.