Scheduled tasks and cron jobs

Sites → your site → Scheduled tasks.

Adding one

A command and a schedule. The command runs in the same environment as the site, with the same PHP version, so wp cron event run --due-now or php artisan schedule:run behave exactly as they do in your shell.

WordPress's own cron

WordPress schedules its jobs on page views, so a quiet site runs its scheduled work late, or not at all, and a busy one runs it thousands of times. Neither is what you want.

The fix is two lines. Set DISABLE_WP_CRON to true in wp-config.php, then add a real schedule here running wp cron event run --due-now every five minutes. Your scheduled posts and your backups plugin then run on a clock rather than on traffic.

Seeing whether it ran

Each task keeps its last runs with the exit code and the output. A task that has never produced output has never run, which is the answer to the commonest question about this screen.

What it cannot do

A scheduled task is bounded — it is stopped if it runs far longer than its schedule, so a job that hangs cannot pile up copies of itself. If you have work that legitimately takes hours, split it or tell support and we will look at it with you.