Take control of your CRON jobs by restricting them to your website's low traffic hours.

Tessa (they/them), AuRise Creative

<p>Take control of your CRON jobs by restricting them to your website’s low traffic hours. From the admin screen, you can:</p>
<ul>
<li>Specify a daily window of when recurring CRON events should be triggered.</li>
<li>Optionally limit events that run multiple times a day to only once a day.</li>
<li>Optionally restrict events that run multiple times a day to only during your off-hours.</li>
<li>Target specific schedules, including custom ones created by other plugins.</li>
<li>Exclude specific CRON hooks from being affected</li>
</ul>
<h4>Benefits</h4>
<p>Restricting your recurring CRON events to only run after hours helps with two (2) things:</p>
<ol>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Less stress is placed on your server when automatic maintenance occurs during low traffic times.</li>
</ol>
<h4>Ensuring CRON Events Always Run</h4>
<p>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:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Use Server CRON.</strong> 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 <code>wp-cron.php</code>. <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/cron/hooking-wp-cron-into-the-system-task-scheduler/" rel="nofollow ugc">View WordPress Documentation</a>.</li>
<li><strong>Use Cron-Job.org.</strong> 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 <code>wp-cron.php</code> file. It is a free service from the German-based developers. Go to <a href="https://cron-job.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">Cron-Job.org</a>.</li>
</ol>


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