Dates and times look wrong
In Ultimate Membership Pro, order dates and the start and expiry times of Memberships follow the Timezone set in the WordPress General Settings. When those times are a few hours off, the time zone is almost always the reason.
This guide sets the time zone correctly and explains the other things that can make a date look wrong.
Before you start
- Know the time zone you run your business in, for example London or New York.
Set the WordPress time zone to your city
Go to Settings›General in WordPress. Under Timezone, choose the city in your time zone and click Save Changes.
A city follows daylight saving time; a fixed offset such as UTC+1 doesn’t, so an offset is an hour off for half of the year.
Default: UTC+0 on a new WordPress site
Compare the clocks
Tools›Site Health › Info › Server shows Current time, Current UTC time and Current Server time side by side.
Times are a few hours off
WordPress still uses UTC, or an offset that doesn’t match where you are.
Set the Timezone to your city as in the step above. New orders and Memberships use it right away.
Expiry times moved after I changed the time zone
Start and expiry times are saved as the clock time of your site at that moment. They aren’t converted when you change the Timezone, so each saved time now means a moment a few hours earlier or later.
Set the Timezone once, before you take members. If you changed it on a live site, check the expiry times of recent Memberships in Members and edit the ones that matter. See Manage your members.
Order dates and Membership dates don’t match
Orders from very old versions of the plugin were dated by the database server’s clock; newer orders use the WordPress time zone. Some member lists and filters also compare dates on the database server. If the database server runs in another time zone, a member can appear as active or expired in those lists a few hours before or after the expiry time.
Ask your host which time zone the database (MySQL or MariaDB) server uses and whether it can match your WordPress time zone. Whether a member can open content is checked with the WordPress time zone, so access itself is right.
Expiry emails and status changes arrive late
The checks for expired subscriptions, payment due dates and trial ends, and the daily notifications, run as WordPress cron events once or twice a day. WordPress cron runs when someone visits the site, so on a quiet site it can run hours later.
Make sure WP-Cron isn’t turned off, or let your host run it from a server cron job. See Requirements.
Dates in emails use the wrong format
Dates that email notifications insert use the Date Format of WordPress.
Pick the format you want in Settings›General › Date Format and save.
Example: a site in London
- Timezone
- London
- Start time
- October 10, 2026, 21:30
- Expiry time
- November 9, 2026, 21:30, London time, also after the clocks change
- With the offset UTC+1 instead
- Every time is an hour off from late October to March
Troubleshooting
Which time zone does Ultimate Membership Pro use?
Ultimate Membership Pro uses the Timezone from Settings › General in WordPress for orders and for the start and expiry times of Memberships.
Should I change the time zone of my server instead?
No. Set the WordPress Timezone; that’s what the plugin reads. Matching the database server’s time zone only helps the lists that compare dates there.
I changed the Timezone. Do I need to update existing orders?
Order dates aren’t converted, so older orders keep the time they were saved with. Only Membership expiry times affect access; check those in Members.
