Publication Date Time Zone

Hi there, @naveenparmuwal,

The time zone of the publication date in the News Sitemap is typically determined by the Timezone setting in your WordPress site’s General Settings. Since you’ve mentioned that your WordPress Timezone is set to IST, but the News Sitemap is showing a different time zone, it might be a caching issue or a misconfiguration.

To address this, you could try the following steps:

1. Clear your site cache if you are using a caching plugin or service.
2. Make sure your WordPress installation and Jetpack plugin are updated to their latest versions.
3. Triple-check that your timezone setting is set to IST on your General Settings option.

Let me know how you get on.

Hi there, @naveenparmuwal,

Thanks for the screeshots! I have some questions because I think I’m missing something out here:

• how did you figure out that there was a mismatch between the news sitemap and the published post? Is it because you don’t see them listed in the sitemap as soon as they get published?
• I checked your Jetpack settings, and I don’t see the Sitemap feature being enabled. In fact, sitemaps on your site are handled by Rank Math. If that’s the case, you may want to reach out to their support if you still have questions.

Hi @naveenparmuwal,

I checked the timestamp in the sitemap, and I can see some mismatches.. For example, I can see this news being published at 12:47 UTC time, and the sitemap shows ICT time instead of IST.

I trust you have already checked the timezone set in your server end, but if not, can you check that for me? The sitemaps are generated by WP-Cron. There is a function scheduled to run that generates or updates the sitemaps, and it picks the time set from the site iteself. So if there’s a mismatch, it’s very likely that the setting to change lies at your end, not Jetpack’s. Hope it helps!

Hi there, @naveenparmuwal,

I see that the sitemap has been switched again to another provider – RankMath. When you temporarily used Jetpack again, I could see the discrepancies, and I was ready to escalate this to our developers for investigation.

Can you see the same timezone discrepancies also in the RankMath sitemap? If so, you may want to report this to their support team as well – possibly, if both sitemaps report the same issue, then it’s likely something strictly related to your site.

In case you’re happy for our developers to investigate the issue, then please activate Jetpack Sitemap, and let us know when you’re done. Thanks!

Hi there, @naveenparmuwal,

It looks like the sitemaps are activated by Jetpack, but the news one is still with RankMath.

• Jetpack sitemaps: https://fmsikar.in/sitemap.xml
• RankMath sitemaps: https://fmsikar.in/news-sitemap.xml

We cannot work on any issues with our developers if the news sitemap is not handled by Jetpack. Let us know when you rectify this, provided you still have issues with the timezone.

Hey @naveenparmuwal,

Oh I see that now! Must be a caching delay on my end.

I have created a report for our developers to investigate:

https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/36217

While they look into this, can you tell me if your authors edit the posts once they’re published? I am asking that because it’s possible that the timestamp doesn’t match if the posts are edited after their publications, and the metadata in the posts show the last published/edited time.

Also, to rule out any other potential plugin conflicts, can you please temporarily deactivate all your plugins and check if the problem gets fixed that way? If it works, then reactivate each plugin one by one to find out which one is causing problems.

You’re welcome to share your replies here or directly in the GitHub link above.