Daylight savings time ends Sunday, November 2, 2014 at 2:00 am in the United States!  It’ll be time to set the clocks ahead one hour and adjust your WordPress time zone to ensure that your posts and comments are tagged with the correct time. For many webmasters, this means manually adjusting the time zone in WordPress, too.

Contrary to popular belief…

WordPress will handle timezones for you!

If you manually selected a UTC offset and have daylight savings time, you’ll have to go in and manually change it twice a year.  This can be a pain to remember to do, and if you’re like us and maintain dozens of WordPress sites, changing the timezone on all of them is a time-consuming process.  Fortunately there is a very simple way around this!

No, you don’t need a plugin for WordPress daylight savings time

For some reason there are a ton of plugins out there that will adjust the timezone in WordPress for you.  If you set it correctly using the instructions below, you an uninstall the plugins.  (And we recommend you do, because they’re quite outdated and not supported.)

Updating WordPress to work with daylight savings time

1. Log in to your WordPress site as an administrator
2. Go to Settings >> General
3. Find the line that says “Timezone” about halfway down the page.

If the dropdown indicates “UTC” like in the image below, you’ll want to make a change.

Timezone settings in WordPress using UTC offset

Simply change the timezone dropdown to a city that’s in your timezone. When you’re done, be sure to click the “Update Settings” button at the bottom of the screen!

Timezone settings in WordPress using a city

You’ll notice that after selecting a city, WordPress will give you more information on that timezone and whether or not it’s in daylight savings time!  This is particularly useful if you’re maintaining sites in other timezones and configuring it this way means that you don’t have to worry about changing the clock in WordPress, ever.

WordPress Tip

Scrolling through the list of cities is a pain.  You can start typing the name of the city that you want to select and WordPress will jump to that item!

One more thing

This is a simple change for wordpress daylight savings time, but now you don’t have to worry about whether or not you’re in “summer time” and when exactly the time change should occur! You’ll still have to manually chance the clocks in your office and home for daylight savings time, though. And while you’re running around changing the clocks, change the batteries in your smoke detector, too. It’s just a good habit to get into and it’s a schedule that’s easy to remember.