WP Crontrol Hours

Take control of your CRON jobs by restricting them to your website’s low traffic hours. From the admin screen, you can:

• Specify a daily window of when recurring CRON events should be triggered.
• Optionally limit events that run multiple times a day to only once a day.
• Optionally restrict events that run multiple times a day to only during your off-hours.
• Target specific schedules, including custom ones created by other plugins.
• Exclude specific CRON hooks from being affected

Benefits

Restricting your recurring CRON events to only run after hours helps with two (2) things:

1. Automatic updates for WordPress core, plugins, and themes are prevented from running during your highest-traffic times so users aren’t shown a maintenance page when it’s the most visible.
2. Less stress is placed on your server when automatic maintenance occurs during low traffic times.

Ensuring CRON Events Always Run

WordPress CRON is based on traffic, which means if your site does not see a lot of traffic, CRON events may not be triggered at the time that they are scheduled. Limiting your website’s CRON events to off-hours while also depending on site traffic to trigger them may not produce the intended results. There are two (2) solutions I recommend:

1. Use Server CRON. It is recommended in the WordPress developer resources to set up your system’s task scheduler to run on the desired intervals and to use that to make a web request to wp-cron.php. View WordPress Documentation.
2. Use Cron-Job.org. If you can’t set up your system’s task scheduler, I recommend outsourcing that job to cron-job.org to automatically ping your website’s wp-cron.php file. It is a free service from the German-based developers. Go to Cron-Job.org.