Sometimes, a developer will want to know why a WordPress site gets slow at a particular time, why their WP-Cron scheduled task isn’t working, or want to force one to run at off time.
Out of the box, WordPress doesn’t make it easy to see you scheduled tasks. You’ll need to use a dedicated plugin and WP Crontrol is the perfect tool. It help you view and manage your cron events and schedules, all in one convenient place.
A quick note before we dive in: while I find WP Crontrol super useful, I don’t think it’s non-developer friendly. If you’re intimidated by PHP, probably skip this one. If you don’t think of yourself as a “WordPress developer”, you probably don’t have a problem that managing your scheduled cron events will solve.
How To View & Manage WordPress Cron Jobs
See, if you ever find yourself debugging code you wrote with the wp_schedule_event function, it is definitely WP Crontrol that I always recommend. Here’s how to get it working…
- Install and activate the WP Crontrol plugin.
- Now, to see its report and other functionality, you’ll go to Tools > Cron Events. This opens the WP Crontrol dashboard.
- There, you’ll see all the “hooks” that are currently scheduled to run.
In addition to seeing all the cron events, here can also manage them: edit, run or pause them.
Why Modify Cron Events in WordPress?
There are several reasons why you might want to modify cron events. Here are some of them:
- Remove tasks you don’t need – Like comment cleanup functions if you don’t use comments.
- Reschedule existing tasks – Move long jobs like backups to hours when you have less traffic, or change how frequently things like plugin and theme update checks happen.
- Create a custom cron task – Personally, I’ve never used and won’t recommend this as a way to schedule code to run (too opaque for future developers), but to each their own.
- Troubleshoot performance problems – See which scheduled tasks might be causing server load issues by seeing what’s running and disabling suspicious crons to test if they’re the culprit.
- Test cron jobs manually – Trigger any scheduled task immediately instead of waiting for its next scheduled run, which is great for debugging.
That’s all. Happy cronning!
