How to Create a Blog Post Checklist in WordPress

We all make mistakes in our blog posts that could be easily avoided by using a blogging checklist. Most successful bloggers use it to check for mistakes and to make sure that their articles are ready to be published. In this article, we will show you how to create a blogging checklist in WordPress to avoid mistakes and speed up your editorial process.

Why You Need a Blogging Checklist in WordPress?

As a blogger you would soon develop a regular style and a process to go through for each and every article you publish. If you are working alone, then you are responsible for catching all the mistakes before an article goes online. Even if you are working on a multi-author site, there is always a chance that someone would forget to add something.

You would need to check spelling and grammar mistakes, add featured image, utilize SEO features, schedule post and so on. As your site grows you will be adding more pre-publish tasks to the process.

This is where a blogging checklist comes in handy. It allows you to go through all the items that you need to check before publishing a post. This is not only useful in catching mistakes, it will also allow you to work faster and more efficiently.

Adding a Pre-Publish Blog Post Checklist in WordPress

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Pre-Publish Post Checklist plugin. Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » Pre-Publish Post Checklist page to configure the plugin.

First you need to click on the Add checklist item to add a task in your blogging check list. Click on the save item, and then repeat the process to add all your checklist tasks.

Below the checklist items you will find the settings for the default action to take when checklist items are not completed. You can choose to not publish a post or warn user about completing the tasks in the checklist.

You can now create a new post or edit an existing one. On the post edit screen you will notice the new Pre-publish checklist box containing all the tasks you need to check before publishing a post.

Simply click on the checkbox next to an item when you have finished it. If you tried to publish a post without checking all the items in the checklist, the plugin will show you a warning.

What You Should Add in Your Blogging Checklist?

The answer really depends on your own editorial workflow and process. However there are some common tasks that are almost essential to any blogger’s pre-publishing checklist.

Our founder, Syed Balkhi, shared his own 14-Point blog post checklist on his website which you should definitely use as a resource for creating your own.

We hope this article helped you add a blogging checklist in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on improving editorial workflow in multi-author WordPress blogs.

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