The Schedule tab decides when your webinar airs. Times are entered in your WordPress site timezone and stored in UTC, and every visitor sees the session time converted to their own timezone, labelled as their local time. The tab names the timezone it is using and warns you if your site is on a fixed UTC offset instead of a city.
Set a city, not an offset:
Under Settings, General, Timezone in WordPress, pick your nearest city, for example Lisbon or New York. A fixed offset never follows daylight saving, so for half the year the times you type would show an hour out to your visitors. Diagnostics warns you about this too.
One off dates:
Add specific dates and times. Good for a launch or a single event. Add as many as you like and each becomes its own session.
Recurring:
Choose how often it repeats from these three options.
- On set days of the week, for example every Monday and Thursday
- Every day
- Every N days, where N is from 2 to 30
Then set the main start time. On the set days option each ticked day can also have its own start time, so a Saturday session can run at a different hour from a Tuesday one. Leave a day blank and it uses the main time. The scheduler keeps the next four occurrences created ahead of time.
Just in time:
A fresh session starts on a repeating interval, set anywhere from 5 to 120 minutes with 15 minutes as the default. A visitor registering at any moment is placed into the next clean interval slot, so nobody waits long. Everyone who registers for the same slot shares the same session and therefore the same chat.
On demand:
Every visitor gets their own session that begins a few seconds after they register. There is no waiting at all, which suits evergreen funnels.
Letting people choose a session:
On one off and recurring webinars, when two or more upcoming sessions exist, the registration form shows a Choose your session picker with the next five, each in the visitor's own timezone. No choice made means the next session, as always. Just in time and on demand webinars have no picker, because their sessions are created as people register.
Changing a schedule:
Changing the schedule only affects new registrations. The public page follows the new schedule straight away, while anyone already registered keeps the exact session they signed up for, with their join link, reminders and replay all still valid.
Repeat registrations and cancelling:
The bottom of the Schedule tab holds the rules for people who register more than once, let registrants switch to another session, and add a cancel link to your emails. See Repeat Registrations, Switching Sessions And Cancelling.
How sessions are created:
A background job runs every five minutes and keeps upcoming sessions created for one off and recurring webinars. If someone registers before that job has run, the plugin works out the next real airing from your saved schedule so the registrant joins the correct session rather than an invented one. If there is genuinely no future airing scheduled, a just in time session is created so registration never fails.
When a session ends:
The same job closes sessions once their airing has finished. The length used is the sum of the narration clips for an AI Deck, the video duration for a Recorded webinar, and a 90 minute fallback where no length is known. Closing a session is what sorts everyone into behaviour groups and queues the follow up emails.
About WordPress cron:
Sessions and timed emails depend on WordPress cron, which on a quiet site only runs when somebody visits the site. If your reminders need to be on time, ask your host to set up a real server cron. Diagnostics tells you if WordPress cron has been disabled.