A popular question among serious bloggers is “When is the best time to publish a post?”. Lorelle had previously touched on this topic, but she concluded that there can be no definitive answer.
I believe that you should keep things as simple as possible, and as such, in my opinion, the best time to publish posts are early in the morning.
Of course, this also depends on the timezone in which the majority of your readers are from; you want to try and publish a post in the morning of when your readers in the most earliest timezone wake up. This means that if you have a large Australian following on your blog, and you were from the United States, then you’d publish a post a lot earlier to synchronize with their morning.
Chances are, though, that the majority of your readers are American, and therefore, you should try and synchronize your publishing schedule with the EST timezone (-5 GMT), since this is the eastern-most timezone of the US (and it’s where places such as New York City are located).
My general rule of thumb is if I have a post that is not time-sensitive, meaning I can post it now, or a year from now, and it is still relevant to my audience, then I will aim to make one post a day.
So, if I already made a post today, then I would save a new post for tomorrow, instead of posting it immediately. I would change the timestamp of the post before publishing it so that it automatically posts the next day at a certain time; you use the ‘Post Timestamp’ box in the Write panel of the WordPress admin to do this.
I typically time my posts to be published in the hour of 6:00 am, because this is the crack of dawn, and if I used anything earlier, I would look like a lunatic for making so many posts at three in the morning.
For time-sensitive posts, such as one that is news-breaking, I would post it immediately for obvious reasons.
I built up this habit for myself because I used to write posts really late at night, and that would have been the worst time in the day to publish a post.
So, I’m curious to know, when do you publish your posts? I’m guessing that most people just hit the Publish button whenever they are done a post, but with the way I outlined above, it only takes an extra few seconds to achieve maximal results.
Gary King is a professional freelance web developer, primarily using Ruby on Rails and PHP to create cool new websites. When he’s not trying to take over the world one blog at a time, you can find him mulling over his thoughts at King Gary.
