Sometimes you need to run WordPress cron a non-standard way, in order to guarantee successful execution on a regular schedule.
The issue with “standard” WordPress cron tasks (which are a pseudo cron in themselves) is these are processed upon certain triggers, which run under PHP as your admin is loaded. This can both slow life down for administrators, as well as making cron tasks a little inconsistent. Worse, if you have big cron tasks, sometimes these are hit by timeouts.
The solution is to run cron under WP CLI (the installation of which on your server is outside of the scope of this tutorial), which uses PHP CLI and therefore is not subject to the same timeouts as PHP might be in your production environment.
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Before You Start – Disabling WordPress Cron
Before you add this as a real cron task, you should disable the standard WordPress cron, by adding the following to your WordPress wp-config.php file:
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', 'true');The Regular Cron Task
You can run these under real sever cron, using a task like:
*/2 * * * * cd /home/webroot/; wp cron event run --due-now > /dev/null 2>&1This would run cron every 2 minutes under Ubuntu linux – tested and works.
The Cloudways Cron Task
However, what if you are not root, or if you’re using a managed service such as Cloudways (for which this tutorial is posted)? Well, you’re going to need to use a slightly different method.
First, we’ll use && to add our second command, secondly, we’ll need to specific where “wp” is located, in this case that is `/usr/local/bin/wp` – giving a command which looks like this:
*/1 * * * * cd /home/master/applications/[APPLICATION-ID]/public_html && /usr/local/bin/wp cron event run --due-nowRemember to replace [APPLICATION-ID] with your application ID, which can be found here in Cloudways panel – Click Applications, then see this to find it:
Where to Insert Cron Task in Cloudways
Insert this in Cloudways under the application > Cron Job Management > Advanced Cron – it should look like this:
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