Schedules, Events and Crons

Introduction

This article is an informational post to advise customers about the customisations to the WordPress cron system on our WordPress Hosting. We do not use the default WP-Cron system and instead manually schedule cron events in WordPress using our own server-side crontab.

Information

WordPress has the ability to schedule posts and run activities in the background at specific times, such as a scheduled post. Plugins and themes can also add events into the WordPress scheduler, for example a security plugin may run periodic scans on your website.

The default method for running these scheduled events in WordPress uses WP-Cron, this is a built in process which triggers when a visitor uses the site. WP-Cron will have set times for events however they require user activity to be triggered. This means events do not always occur at the time they specified, but instead when a user visits the site, which maybe hours later depending on the traffic of the site.

Depending on the number of queued events at the time this can also slow down the website for that user until all scheduled events have been completed, resulting in a poor user experience.

At 34SP.com our WordPress Hosting disables the built in wp-cron and instead runs the scheduled events via the server-side crontab.

Crontab behaviour (the 5 minute rule)

Using the crontab means events will occur in the background, regardless of interaction with your site. The WordPress event cron runs every 5 minutes, this means any scheduled activities should run within 5 minutes of their scheduled time. This can result in some slight delays to scheduled posts, but it should provide an improvement on the default WordPress behaviour, especially for lower traffic sites.

My plugin says WP-Cron is disabled

Some plugins will look to see if WP-Cron is enabled as it is a requirement of most plugins that handle scheduled tasks.

On our WordPress Hosting you will likely see a warning that WP-Cron is disabled from these plugins. This warning can be ignored because whilst WP-Cron is disabled in the site’s config files – your site is actually set up to run WP-Cron every 5 minutes via the server-side crontab.

Please do contact our support team if your plugin is not running its scheduled tasks.