Skip to main content
Most tests you start manually and stop when the verdict is in. Some tests benefit from a schedule, a Black Friday hero, a launch-day homepage, a seven-day validation on a limited feature. That is what the Schedule section handles.
Availability. Scheduled starts, ends, and max-run-days are on the Starter plan and above. Legacy Free accounts can still start and stop manually. The free tier closed to new signups on 5 September 2026; see the Free tier. See pricing.

​
Three fields

Under Schedule in the editor, you can set any combination of:
  • Start date and time. When to flip the experiment from Draft to Live. Defaults to “start when I click Start now”.
  • End date and time. When to auto-stop. Blank means run until you stop it.
  • Stop after (days). A safety cap, labelled “Stop after” in the editor. If set, the test auto-stops that many days after it actually starts. It counts 24 hour days from the start instant, not calendar days, so a cap that spans a daylight-saving change lands an hour off the original local time.
The start and end fields use your project timezone, which is set once per site under Settings → General. If your project is America/New_York, “9 AM” means 9 AM Eastern. The editor labels each field with the zone and its current UTC offset.
What gets stored is the exact moment your wall clock time resolves to, not the wall clock time itself. If you schedule 9 AM Eastern in October and the experiment starts in November, after the clocks change, it starts at 8 AM Eastern. Changing your project timezone later re-displays an existing schedule, it never moves it.

​
Use Schedule for later, not Save changes

Fill the schedule fields, then click Schedule for later at the top-right. That one button does everything: it saves the experiment and flips its status to Scheduled.
Save changes does not apply a schedule. On a draft it saves everything else and silently drops the start, end, and stop-after you just typed. The editor warns you when this happens, with a “Saved, but not scheduled” message. If you see it, click Schedule for later to actually schedule the test.
Scheduled does not mean live. A job runs every minute, picks up experiments whose start time has passed, and starts them, so a start can land up to about a minute late. To cancel a schedule and put it back to Draft, use Cancel schedule from the row menu or the detail page.

​
Auto-stop lands in Paused

When the end date arrives (or max-days is hit), the experiment transitions to Paused, not Archived. Nothing is deleted. The results page stays available and any team member with the right role can review, then choose to Resume or Archive.
Auto-stop does not notify anyone. There is no email and no alert when a test stops itself. The experiment moves to Paused and waits. If your day-seven test needs a day-eight look, put that reminder in your own calendar.

​
What happens to bucketed visitors on auto-stop

Existing bucketed visitors stop seeing the variant on their next pageview, once the new configuration reaches them. Allow a few minutes end to end: up to about a minute for the stop itself, then up to about three more while the previous configuration ages out of the caches between us and the visitor’s browser. Historical data is preserved and the results page keeps working.

​
Scheduled + activation triggers

A scheduled experiment respects its activation trigger like any other. If your test is set to On click and cron starts it at 9 AM, the first exposure fires when the first eligible visitor clicks, not at 9 AM sharp.

​
Corner cases

Start date in the past, rejected. Use Start now instead. End date before start, rejected. Less than five minutes between start and end, rejected. The whole window could otherwise elapse between two runs of the job that starts and stops experiments. End date without a start, allowed, but it cannot be scheduled. Moving an experiment to Scheduled requires a start time in the future. An end date on its own takes effect when you click Start now, and becomes the auto-stop. Stop after and end date both set, whichever comes first wins.
Last modified on September 1, 2026