Can you fill in the blank in this sentence?
Sometimes I’ve been so excited about a post I’ve written that I rushed to hit the publish button and totally forgot to _________ (insert important activity here) first.
Maybe you’ve forgotten to attach the feature image you slaved over. Maybe you forgot to take care of SEO. Or maybe you forgot to assign tags and categories to your post. Or maybe you forgot to profread proofread one last time before you hit that magic publish button.
Let’s face it. We’ve all done it.
Pre-Publish Post Checklist Plugin
One of my go-to plugins is the Pre-Publish Post Checklist Plugin by Andrew Mead, available from the WordPress plugin repository. This plugin let’s you customize a to-do list that shows in the post entry page of your admin panel and control what happens if you click publish but have missed checking off one of the items. You can set it to warn you or even to prevent you from publishing altogether. Although it was last updated two years ago and hasn’t been tested with the most recent version of WordPress, I haven’t had any issues with this simple plugin.
By default, there are no check list items so the first step after installing and activating the plugin is to create your own checklist. My checklists differ from one website to the other but share some common elements. For instance, on one of my websites, I have a set publishing schedule so I remind myself to set a scheduled publish date and time. On the other hand, I always remind myself to attach a featured image and to double check my SEO is taken care of. I leave the default of a simple warning but if you have a multi-author blog, you might want to set this to prevent publishing unless all the checklist items are checked.
