System Cron & Custom Cron Jobs

By default, WP Cron “fires” whenever you have a visitor on your site. This is what sends out email notifications to your members, and triggers various other website activities.

However, sometimes your website won’t have enough traffic to trigger this on a regular basis and it can be frustrating when you have things like memberships that need to be updated often.

This is where system cron or custom cron jobs come in, and there are a few options available to you as detailed in this document.

Note that SWS hosting environments utilize server-side crons that call the WordPress scheduling system via WP-CLI every 5 minutes to ensure your scheduled tasks run on time, every time. This eliminates the need for alternative cron usage or external services.

However, if you do need to define a custom cron job that fires more frequently than every 5 minutes on our hosting, you can use a plugin or 3rd-party service (on our Managed WordPress hosting, members do not have the root access required to modify this behavior via SSH).

The plugin method also works fine on most 3rd-party hosts to define cron jobs at any frequency you need whether or not you have root access or SSH knowledge.