Cron jobs

A cron job is a server-side task that schedules a job to run at a specific time or repeating interval. Cron jobs exist to help automate repetitive tasks or to schedule a task to run in the future – it’s like having an extra set of hands (so your actual hands are free to do something fun, like eat tacos!)

For example, you can schedule a repetitive task to back your site up nightly at 1:00 AM, or you can have a task that only runs once to publish a blog post at 4:15 PM next Tuesday.

Cron jobs at Flywheel

At Flywheel, we don’t allow users to create or manage cron jobs at the server-level, since this would require a higher level of access to the server that we limit for security reasons. Good news though, WordPress® has its own built-in robust task scheduling system called WP Cron, and you can tap into this awesome functionality to manage existing jobs or create your own!¹

Cron jobs with WordPress

WordPress is already using WP Cron behind the scenes for many things, like publishing scheduled posts, checking for updates, and general maintenance. Plugins will also create their own WP Cron jobs automating some of their tasks. For example, the WooCommerce® plugin creates jobs for things like reoccurring subscription payments.¹

Limitations of WP Cron

Low-traffic sites

If you have a low-traffic site, it might not get enough visitors to run jobs at the time they’ve been scheduled.

For example, if a task is scheduled to run at 10 AM, and nobody visits the site until 11:37 AM, that job will be running later than it was scheduled, since there wasn’t a page load to trigger WP Cron. However, you can easily get around this by creating a free account with an external cron service!

The solution, External Cron!

You can use an external cron service to ping the WordPress cron system at a regular interval, like once every 15 minutes, running the jobs that are currently due.

There are a couple of free services you can use to do this.

• cron-job.org – (Free up to 1 request per minute)
• EasyCron – (Free up to 2–3 requests per hour)

You need to set the external service to ping your site’s wp-cron.php file.
If your site was "myflysite.com", you would set it to ping: https://myflysite.com/wp-cron.php

Managing and creating WP Cron jobs

So, how do I go about creating and editing cron jobs, you might ask? Well, there are a number of plugins that will allow you to interact with WP Cron jobs.

Our favorite is the WP Crontrol plugin. WP Crontrol allows you to see what jobs are already running on your site, adjust how often they run, as well as create your own WP cron jobs.

Need help?

If you have any questions our Happiness Engineers are here to help!