If your posts are not being unpublished at the correct time, this guide will help. Please follow through all the steps to check that your site is ready to unpublish content on schedule.
Step #1. Have you disabled all caching services and plugins? #
Caching plugins and services and the most common cause of problems with PublishPress Future. If posts are not expiring correctly, please test your site with all caching layers disabled.
Step #2. Have you confirmed WP Cron is working on your site? #
By default, PublishPress Future relies on WP Cron to run future actions on your content. This post has technical details on how it works.
- Using WP Cron? Go to “Future” in your WordPress admin menu and then clicking the “Diagnostics” tab. You will see a green check mark if WP Cron is enabled.
- Check your site's wp-config.php file. Some developers and hosting companies add lines that will disable cron on your site. For example:
define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true);If you have that constant defined as true, that means your site won't trigger cron events when your site is visited. But it still can trigger those events if your server has a cron job properly configured to callwp-cron.phpor run the CLI commandwp cron event run --due-now.
Step #3. Check site health tests #
Go to “Tools” in your WordPress admin menu and click on “Site Health”. Wait a few seconds until all the tests are finished and check if there is any recommended improvements or errors. You can double check clicking on the button “Passed tests” and looking for a test “Scheduled events are running”.
Sometimes you can see a recommended improvement “A scheduled event is late”. Click on it, and check if it is related to the event “action_scheduler_run_queue”. If so, wait a few minutes, than check again.
Step #4. Are cron tasks being created? #
Next, check your cron tasks. PublishPress Future will show whether or not a cron job has been successfully set up for your posts to expire. You can confirm this by going to “Future Actions” in your WordPress admin menu and making sure your actions are listed and are “Pending”:
Step #5. Is the problem with your server? #
- Test PublishPress Future another site on the same server. If you see the same problem, the issue is with your site. If you don't see the same problem, the issue is with your original site.
- Test PublishPress Future on a clone of your site but on a different server or local host. If you don't see the same problem, the issue is with your original server.