adelessert

WordPress’s built in cron system is clever, but notoriously unreliable. <a href="https://deadmanssnitch.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Dead Man’s Snitch</a> is a great service for monitoring any sort of scheduled task, and is a simple way to make sure that your WordPress cron jobs are working properly. If WP-Cron isn’t working properly, WordPress might not be updating itself regularly, scheduled posts may turn up late or not at all, and other features you count on might not work.
This plugin simply allows you to store your Snitch URL in the WordPress admin, and requests it once per hour. If Dead Man’s Snitch doesn’t hear from WordPress when it expects to, it’ll send you an email notification.

WP Dead Man’s Snitch

WordPress's built in cron system is clever, but notoriously unreliable.

Viktor Szépe

Execute WP-cron manually by clicking a button on the Dashboard. 
WP-cron is WordPress’ scheduler system, it can execute background jobs like plugin updates.
Manual Cron is a Dashboard widget available for every user.
If you have poorly written plugins WP-cron’s output may not be empty.
<h4>Links</h4>
Development goes on on <a href="https://github.com/szepeviktor/manual-cron" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub</a>.

Manual Cron

Triggers WP-cron from a Dashboard widget and displays output.

WP Dead Man’s Snitch vs Manual Cron