What is a cron job?
A cron job pings your website to trigger the execution of tasks. For example a stock or price update. It's critical that the cron job is getting triggered, otherwise your website will be out of sync or delayed in updates.
Set-up a cron job on your server
In some occasions it's recommended to set-up a cron job outside of WordPress, to be sure that background processes run on time. Issues that can be caused due to cron jobs not being executed:
Updating products is stuck or slower than expected (every 30 minutes should be the standard)
Product import is stuck or very slow
Scheduled Actions with status
pendingstate are piling up
The WordPress cron system relies on website visitors. If your website doesn't have regular visits yet, the background processes don't run often or fast enough. To prevent this from happening, it's recommended to set-up a cron job which will access the website as if it's a visitor and triggers the background processes.
We recommend to set-up a cron job that visits the site every 3 minutes using the following permalink as example:
Follow the steps below to configure the cron job on your server:
Step 1) Disable the default WordPress cron
Add this to your wp-config.php file:
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);This prevents WordPress from triggering cron on page loads.
Step 2) Add a real cron job
Execute the following steps on a normal Linux server:
Open terminal (SSH into server)
ssh user@yourserver
Open crontab
crontab -e
Add this line
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /home/username/public_html/wp-cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1
Cron timing explained
*/5 * * * *
This means:
Every 5 minutes
Every hour
Every day
Every month
Every weekday
For WooCommerce:
Every 5 minutes = ideal
Every 1 minute = heavy stores
Every 15 minutes = low traffic blog
One click cron job integration Woosa plugin
All Woosa plugins support a feature called Heartbeat. This is an external cron job set-up on the Woosa servers, which can be enabled in the plugin settings of all our plugins with one simple click.
Follow the steps below to enable the Woosa heartbeat/cron job:
Go to your WordPress backend
Click on the Woosa plugin name (e.g. vidaXL) in the WordPress menu
Go to the Heartbeat tab
Click to enable the Heartbeat
NOTE: it can happen that your server is blocking visits from our heartbeat/cron job URL, due to IP restrictions or firewalls. If that's the case, please consult our support desk. They will assist you in solving this issue.