How to Unschedule a Post

Sometimes, you’ll schedule a post and then decide you won’t be ready to publish it for a while.

When that happens, rescheduling won’t do. Instead, you can unschedule the post completely turning it back into a regular draft.

There are two ways to unschedule a post.

1. Unschedule with the sidebar

Click the “Show Unscheduled Drafts” button at the top right of the calendar to open the sidebar.

Show Unscheduled Drafts button

Inside, you’ll see every draft on your site that hasn’t been scheduled yet.

To unschedule one of the posts in the calendar, simply drag and drop it from the calendar into the sidebar

The sidebar will flash green to let you know the change has been saved, and the post will be unscheduled.

At this point, the post is exactly the same in all ways, except it no longer has a scheduled date.

While it’s easy to unschedule posts from the calendar, the WordPress editor also has a built-in method for unscheduling posts.

Inside the editor, locate the blue text that reads, “Switch to draft.” It appears to the left of the “Schedule” button.

"Switch to draft" button

Click that button and WordPress will ask you to confirm unscheduling your post.

Unscheduling confirmation popup

Click “OK” and the post will be unscheduled.

The unscheduled post is now an ordinary draft and will no longer appear in the content calendar.

If you’re using the Classic Editor, the steps are slightly different.

Inside the editor, click the blue “Edit” link next to the “Scheduled” post status.

Edit status link

This will reveal a dropdown menu with the available statuses. Click the dropdown and select “Draft” from the list.

Status dropdown select

Once “Draft” is selected, click the “OK” button. Then click the blue “Update” button to save your changes and unschedule the post.

Any posts that you unschedule can be scheduled again at any point in the future.

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