Best time to post
Best time to post on Pinterest
Pinterest is the platform where 'best time to post' is mostly the wrong question. A pin doesn't fade by lunchtime. It gets indexed, shows up in search and in the home feed, and can keep earning saves and clicks for months. The hour you publish barely moves that. What moves it is whether the pin is fresh, whether it's on the right board, and whether it goes up weeks before people start searching for it.
So this page treats timing the way Pinterest does: a light touch on the clock and a firm rule on the calendar. You'll get a weekday table, an honest note on how little it matters, and the seasonal planning that actually decides reach on Pinterest.
The short answer: starting windows to test
The windows below are when people tend to browse and plan, and the differences between days are small. Use them to pick a habit, not to chase an hour. The number that matters on Pinterest is how many weeks ahead of the season you publish, which the footnote covers. Local time of your audience, not yours.
| Day | Windows to test (local time) | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 8 to 10 pm | Weekday evenings are planning time; the day itself barely matters. |
| Tuesday | 8 to 10 pm | Same as Monday. Use the day for a fresh pin, not for timing. |
| Wednesday | 8 to 10 pm | A fine day to publish next month's seasonal pins. |
| Thursday | 8 to 10 pm | Same as the rest of the week. |
| Friday | 12 to 2 pm, 8 to 10 pm | Weekend planning starts at Friday lunch: recipes, outings, projects. |
| Saturday | 9 to 11 am, 8 to 10 pm | The busiest browsing day for home, food, and craft. |
| Sunday | 9 am to 12 pm, 8 to 10 pm | Sunday evening is the closest Pinterest has to a peak hour. |
Seasonality is the real best time. People start searching for Christmas ideas in autumn, for summer in spring, and for back-to-school in midsummer. Publish seasonal pins at least a month ahead, six weeks for the big holidays, so they've been indexed and collected a few saves by the time searches climb. The table above is for your everyday pins.
How Pinterest decides who sees your pin
Pinterest is closer to a search engine than a social network. When you publish a pin, Pinterest reads the title, the description, the board it's on, and the image itself to work out what it's about, then shows it in search results and in the home feeds of people whose interests match. That takes hours to days, and a pin that does well keeps being shown for months. There's no first-hour test that decides its fate.
What Pinterest does reward is freshness: a new image, or a new image and link pair, that hasn't been on the platform before. Re-saving your own old pin to another board doesn't count. So the rhythm that matters isn't the hour, it's publishing new pins steadily, every week, onto boards whose names and descriptions match what people search for.
Timing still exists, just on a different scale. Search on Pinterest is seasonal, and people plan early: the searches for a holiday, a season, or an event start rising weeks before it, and your pin needs to be indexed and collecting saves by then. That's the best time to post on Pinterest: the right month, not the right hour.
What changes the answer for your account
Your niche's season
Food, home, weddings, fashion, fitness, and travel each have their own calendar. Pinterest Trends shows when searches for a topic rise and fall over the year. Work backwards from the peak and publish four to six weeks before it.
Where your audience is
Seasons flip across the equator and holidays differ by country. Pinterest Analytics shows your audience by country; if you're big in the US, plan around Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, not just Christmas.
Fresh pins or repins
New pins get the reach. If your week's plan is mostly re-saving existing pins to more boards, expect little. One new pin a day, each with its own image, beats ten repins.
Boards and keywords
The board a pin sits on tells Pinterest what it's about. A pin about spring garden ideas on a board called Garden ideas, with those words in the title and description, will be found. The same pin on a board called Misc won't.
How to find your own best time: in pinterest analytics and trends (free)
- 1
Open Pinterest Analytics from your business account and set the range to 90 days. Sort your pins by saves and outbound clicks, not impressions.
- 2
Note the publish date of your top ten pins and how long after publishing they took off. On Pinterest that's often days or weeks later, which is the point.
- 3
Open the audience section and note the top countries, so you know whose seasons you're planning around.
- 4
Open Pinterest Trends, search your main topics, and note the month searches start climbing. Put that date, minus four to six weeks, in your calendar. That's your publish date.
Pinterest Analytics doesn't chart when your followers are online by hour, and it doesn't need to. The gap from publish date to peak, and the Trends curve, are the two numbers that decide your timing.
In Lemonpost
Lemonpost's analytics build a best-time heatmap for your Pinterest account from your own published pins, in your time zone, which is useful for settling on an everyday posting habit. The bigger help is the calendar: schedule image and video pins to any board weeks ahead, each with its own title, description, destination link, and custom video cover, so seasonal content goes up on time without you having to remember the date.
A six-week test that settles it
- Pick two everyday windows from the table above, say Tuesday evening and Saturday morning, and one seasonal topic from Pinterest Trends that peaks two to three months out.
- For six weeks, publish one fresh pin per window, alternating, on the right boards. In the same six weeks, publish your seasonal pins for that topic, spread over the first three weeks.
- After the six weeks, compare saves and outbound clicks per everyday window, measured at 30 days after each pin, not at 24 hours. If the difference is small, which it usually is, pick the window you can keep up.
- When the seasonal peak arrives, check whether those pins are climbing. If they are, you've found your lead time. Next year, publish a week earlier and see if it helps.
FAQ
Pinterest timing questions
Whenever your own followers are online matters less on Pinterest than on any other platform, because pins live for months and reach people through search. As a starting habit, evenings from 8 to 10 pm and weekend mornings work. The real best time is on the calendar: publish seasonal pins a month or more before people start searching.
A little, mostly for the small burst of home-feed views a pin gets from followers on day one. It's a tie-breaker. Freshness, keywords, boards, and lead time on seasonal content each matter more.
At least a month, and six weeks or more for the big ones like Christmas, Halloween, and summer. Pinterest Trends shows when searches for your topic start rising; publish before that point, not at the peak.
A fresh pin a day is a good target for a small team, and three to five a week is fine if that's what you can keep up. Steady beats bursts, because Pinterest keeps showing pins for months and rewards accounts that keep adding new ones.
Sparingly. Pinterest treats a new image as fresh content and a re-save as the same pin again. If a pin fits three boards, make a second image for it rather than saving the same one three times.
No. Pins published through the official Pinterest API are treated the same as pins made in the app. Scheduling is how seasonal content goes up six weeks early without you having to remember it in the middle of summer.
Post at the right hour without being awake for it
Schedule a week of posts in one sitting. Lemonpost publishes them at the times your own heatmap picks.