As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the “Save” and “Publish” buttons are right next to one another when you are in the “Write Post” tool in WordPress. While WordPress is set up to auto-save your content at regular intervals, there are times when you’ll still want to hit the Save button, because you want to make sure that it has actually saved everything that you have written.

You’ve probably experienced the scenario where you’re almost finished writing a world class blog post and then something goes awry, effectively eliminating all of that hard work. Not a pleasant experience, to say the least. That’s why it’s so important to save early and save often. You do it in Microsoft Office and you should do it in WordPress too.

Unfortunately, because the “Save” and “Publish” buttons are right next to one another, you may accidentally hit Publish when you really want to click on Save. As a result, your half-completed blog post can go live and this is obviously not a good thing, especially if you still have a lot of content to write or a lot of editing to do.

A simple trick to overcome this problem is to make use of the timestamp feature, even if you plan on publishing the post immediately after it is done. Upon opening the Write Post tool, go to the area where it says “Publish immediately” (above the Save/Publish buttons) and click on the Edit link next to it. Bump the timestamp to some date in the future.

This way, if you accidentally hit Publish, the post will only be timestamped to go live in the future and not to go live immediately. When you are ready for the article to go live, simply switch the timestamp back to the current time and it will be published immediately.