WordPress Publishing Workflow

This workflow takes a draft that's already been approved and puts it into WordPress for you: body, title, meta description, categories and featured image. It's the least glamorous workflow here, and one of the most useful.

If you've ever pasted an article from Google Docs into WordPress, you know the drill. The formatting breaks, images need re-uploading, someone forgets the meta description, and the category is wrong. It's half an hour of fiddly work per post, and mistakes creep in when you're rushing. Priya used to do this for every post and then check it twice. Automating it means the copy-paste step simply disappears.

At a glance

• What it does: Get approved content into WordPress with every SEO field filled in correctly.
• Difficulty: Beginner. A good first project. A no-code tool and a few connected accounts are usually enough.
• Automation level: Level 2 on the levels of SEO automation. In plain words: a fixed chain of steps.
• Steps: 5, from "Approved draft" to "Notify".

What you'll need

Tools

• WordPress API: the part of WordPress that lets software create and update posts. See the WordPress API guide.
• n8n: a workflow tool that connects your apps by dragging boxes around, so you don't need to write code. See n8n.

What goes in

• An approved draft, in a doc, sheet or database
• WordPress login details for a dedicated API user
• Your SEO plugin's field names, for example Yoast or Rank Math
• Your list of categories and tags

What comes out

• A WordPress post, saved as a draft or scheduled
• SEO title, meta description and URL filled in
• A message to the team with a link to the post

How it works, step by step

1. Approved draft. The workflow only starts when a draft is marked approved, for example when a status column in your content sheet changes to Approved.
2. Map fields. It matches each part of your draft to the right WordPress field: title, body, excerpt, SEO title, meta description and URL slug (the last part of the web address).
3. Create post. It creates the post through the WordPress API, the part of WordPress that lets other software add content.
4. Set metadata. It sets the category, tags, featured image and your SEO plugin's fields.
5. Notify. It sends a Slack message or email with a link to the post, so someone can do a final check.

A worked example

Say a writer finishes a post in Google Docs, and an editor changes its row in your content sheet to Approved. Within a few minutes, n8n picks up the change, converts the doc to clean formatting, creates a WordPress draft, sets the category to Guides, adds the featured image, and fills in the SEO title and meta description from the sheet.

It then posts a link in your team's Slack channel. The editor clicks through, checks the preview on a phone, and hits publish.

Where AI helps, and where it doesn't

• Drafting a meta description or excerpt when one is missing, for a person to approve.
• Suggesting categories and tags based on the content.
• Cleaning up messy formatting from a pasted document.

Most of this workflow doesn't need AI at all, and that's a good thing: it's predictable. Keep AI well away from the publish decision.

What to keep human

• Nothing goes live without a person approving it. The workflow saves drafts, and a human presses publish.

For more on deciding how much to hand over, see the SEO autonomy dial and what not to automate.

What can go wrong

• An unapproved or half-finished draft gets published by mistake because a status was set wrong.

Start small

Have the workflow create WordPress drafts only, never published posts. Map just the title, body and meta description at first. Add categories, images and scheduling once the basics work every single time.

Where to go next

• Using the WordPress API
• Automating WordPress SEO
• SEO automation with n8n
• Keyword to Article Workflow
• Real-world examples of SEO automation in practice
• All workflows