John Blackbourn

scompt

<p>WP Crontrol enables you to take control of the scheduled cron events on your WordPress website or WooCommerce store. From the admin screens you can:</p>
<ul>
<li>View all scheduled cron events along with their arguments, schedule, callback functions, and when they are next due.</li>
<li>Edit, delete, pause, resume, and immediately run cron events.</li>
<li>Add new cron events.</li>
<li>Bulk delete cron events.</li>
<li>Add and remove custom cron schedules.</li>
<li>Export and download cron event lists as a CSV file.</li>
</ul>
<p>WP Crontrol is aware of timezones, will alert you to events that have no actions or that have missed their schedule, and will show you a helpful warning message if it detects any problems with your cron system.</p>
<h3>Usage</h3>
<ol>
<li>Go to the <code>Tools <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> Cron Events</code> menu to manage cron events.</li>
<li>Go to the <code>Settings <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> Cron Schedules</code> menu to manage cron schedules.</li>
</ol>
<h3>Documentation</h3>
<p><a href="https://wp-crontrol.com/docs/how-to-use/" rel="nofollow ugc">Extensive documentation on how to use WP Crontrol and how to get help for error messages that it shows is available on the WP Crontrol website</a>.</p>
<h3>For site owners</h3>
<p>Owners of WordPress websites and WooCommerce stores use WP Crontrol to ensure that scheduled cron events run correctly and efficiently. By providing complete control over cron events, WP Crontrol helps you:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Improve reliability</strong>: Address missed or failed cron events, ensuring your website or WooCommerce store continues to function as expected.</li>
<li><strong>Enhance security</strong>: Monitor and control cron events to ensure automatic update checks are performed as they should.</li>
<li><strong>Simplify management</strong>: Add, edit, delete, and pause cron events from a user-friendly interface, without needing to write any code.</li>
<li><strong>Gain insights</strong>: Export cron event data for analysis or reporting.</li>
<li><strong>Action Scheduler compatibility</strong>: Full support for the Action Scheduler system in WooCommerce, which is used to process recurring payments, subscriptions, and background orders.</li>
<li><strong>Clarity of times and timezones</strong>: All times are shown with a clear and accurate indication of which timezone applies. No more guesswork!</li>
</ul>
<h3>For developers</h3>
<p>Developers use WP Crontrol to streamline and debug their WordPress development process:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Enhanced debugging</strong>: Identify and troubleshoot issues with scheduled tasks, ensuring your scheduled events and their callbacks run as expected.</li>
<li><strong>Custom schedules</strong>: Create and manage custom cron schedules to fit the specific needs of your website, plugins, or themes, providing greater flexibility than just the core schedules.</li>
<li><strong>Efficient workflow</strong>: Add, edit, and delete cron events directly from the WordPress admin interface, saving time and reducing the need for manual coding.</li>
<li><strong>Insightful monitoring</strong>: Get insight into the performance and behavior of your scheduled tasks, allowing for optimization and better resource management.</li>
<li><strong>Accurate debugging</strong>: WP Crontrol goes to great lengths to ensure that running an event manually does so in a manner which exactly matches how WordPress core runs schdeuled events. This ensures that you can debug events accurately and with confidence.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Other Plugins</h3>
<p>I maintain several other plugins for developers. Check them out:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/" rel="ugc">Query Monitor</a> is the developer tools panel for WordPress.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/user-switching/" rel="ugc">User Switching</a> provides instant switching between user accounts in WordPress.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Privacy Statement</h3>
<p>WP Crontrol is private by default and always will be. It does not send data to any third party, nor does it include any third party resources. <a href="https://wp-crontrol.com/privacy/" rel="nofollow ugc">WP Crontrol’s full privacy statement can be found here</a>.</p>
<h3>Accessibility Statement</h3>
<p>WP Crontrol aims to be fully accessible to all of its users. <a href="https://wp-crontrol.com/accessibility/" rel="nofollow ugc">WP Crontrol’s full accessibility statement can be found here</a>.</p>


WP Crontrol

I use this plugin all the time when testing cron events or problem solving. As far as I am concerned it is an essential part of a developer's tool kit.

Must have plugin for developers

As everybody else say: This plugin was great, but after releasing an automatic update with a fatal error, about 200 000 sites world-wide went down - among others some of our customers'.

We have no reason to think that this was intentional, but nonetheless it's unacceptable, and there's nothing that says this developer won't do this again.

Do not install.

From great to disaster

Useful tool


WP Crontrol helped me spot a mistake that I made in my wp_schedule call.


Useful tool for cron schedule debugging


This plugin is my personal lifesaver!



Thank you!


Another must-have for any developer!


Like everything from John, this is powerful and incredibly useful debugging tool. Great features, great code, great UI, and great support.


Immensely powerful and useful debugging tool


WP Crontrol is a highly useful WordPress plugin for managing and debugging cron jobs. It offers a simple interface to view, edit, and delete scheduled tasks, making it an essential tool for troubleshooting and optimizing site performance. Perfect for developers who need better control over WordPress's cron system. Highly recommend!


Very useful debugging tool


This plugin is obviously written by a very thoughtful and competent author. It just works, unobtrusive and very easy UI. And the associated website gives invaluable information on various situations which one may encounter. Worth six stars! THANKS John.


Amazing, solid work

WP Crontrol enables you to take control of the cron events on your WordPress website.

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>


WP Crontrol Hours

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

WP Crontrol vs WP Crontrol Hours