See Your WordPress Scheduled Tasks

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. For all of these problems, the WP Crontrol plugin is the perfect tool. It’s a WordPress plugin to quickly debug your WP-Cron issues, all in one convenient place.

And a quick note before we dive it: 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. You probably *don’t* have a problem that WP-Crontrol is made to solve, if you don’t think of yourself as a “WordPress PHP developer.”

Video Summary of Seeing Scheduled Tasks with WP Crontrol

Out of the box, WordPress doesn’t make it easy to see you scheduled tasks. That’s where WP Crontrol comes it. See your schedule tasks quickly and easily, just by installing the plugin:

See Scheduled WP-Cron Tasks, written steps

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…

  1. In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to “Plugins > Add New”
  2. Do a search for “WP Crontrol” (note that that name has *two* Rs in it). What you want is a plugin whose author is listed as John Blackboun & crontibuters (again, note the two Rs 🤪). Install and activate the WP Crontrol plugin.
  3. Now, to see its report and other functionality, you’ll go to “Tools > Cron Events” this is the “homescreen” for the WP Crontrol plugin. On that you’ll see all the “hooks” that are currently scheduled to run (with the option to run them) as well as a place to quickly schedule events. 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.

That’s all. Happy cronning!


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