Sometimes, you might want to update a live WordPress page or post on your site, but you want the change to only appear at a certain time. Normally to do that, you’d have to make your change, then unpublish your page, and schedule it to go live later. But if you do that, and people visit your page in the meantime, your original information is not available, and your visitor will see a “page not found” error, leaving a poor impression.
So how can you update a live WordPress page or post, without making your changes appear right away?
There are two good solutions for this.
PublishPress Revisions (formerly called Revisionary)
Available from the WordPress Repository
With this plugin, you can edit your existing page or post, and then schedule your changes to take effect later on. Until your changes are published, your original content remains live on your website.
In February 2019,PublishPress acquired Press Permit, and Press Permit creator Kevin Behrens joined the PublishPress team. This means continued development on PublishPress Revisions, as well as its associated plugins, Press Permit and Capability Manager Enhanced.
The PublishPress Revisions plugin also works in conjunction with the Press Permit Core plugin, so you can limit the user roles allowed to schedule these updates. There is a pro bundle of plugins available that includes the pro version of PublishPress Revisions, and a lot of other useful plugins, like Multiple Authors and Press Permit Pro.
Revisionize
Available from the WordPress RepositoryThis one works a bit differently than Revisionary. It clones your post or page to a draft so you can revise the content behind the scenes. Once you are ready to take your changes live, publishing the revision copies your content to the original post. You can also schedule the revision if you want to publish your updated content at a certain time.
A few caveats to be aware of:
- If you change the page title and slug (URL), the new slug will take effect and you’ll need to do a 301 redirect from the old page to the new one.
- As is the case for scheduled posts and other native WordPress functions, wp-cron has to be running properly on your site for the change to show up.
- If you are using a caching plugin, these may not work as expected.
- With Revisionize, you may need to clear out draft posts after your scheduled change has gone live.
Do you have another solution for this issue? Let us know!
