Use cases · WordPress
WordPress cron jobs and wp-cron use cases
wp-cron only fires when a visitor lands on the site. The spokes below cover the patterns teams use Crontap for on WordPress and WooCommerce stacks.
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WordPress
WordPress's built-in scheduler is a hook in wp-cron.php that fires on visitor traffic. On a low-traffic site that means a 5am Monday digest goes out whenever the first staff member opens the admin tab, and a hourly inventory sync misses every quiet hour. The fix is structural: disable wp-cron, and have an external clock hit /wp-cron.php on a real cadence in the site's actual timezone.
These spokes cover the two anchors. WordPress core is the every-5-minute (or every-1-minute on Pro) ping at wp-cron.php that drains the event queue reliably. WooCommerce adds Action Scheduler on top, which has its own per-task tables but still depends on the wp-cron tick to run, so the same external trigger fixes both. Per-shop timezones, custom headers, and failure alerts to Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, or webhook are baked into every Crontap schedule.
Use cases on WordPress
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The same WordPress topic, from other angles.
FAQ
Common questions on WordPress
- Do these spokes assume a specific WordPress host?
- No. The pattern works on Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround, Bluehost, self-hosted, anything that exposes /wp-cron.php over HTTPS. Hosts that expose their own real crontab still benefit because Crontap centralises monitoring across multiple sites.
- Can I run the same Crontap schedule against staging and production?
- You set up two schedules, one per environment, with different URLs and (usually) different cadences. Staging gets a less aggressive interval to keep load down. Failure alerts can route to different channels.
- Where does WooCommerce's Action Scheduler fit in?
- Action Scheduler is a queue table that sits inside the WordPress database. It still relies on the wp-cron tick to run. So the WooCommerce spoke uses the same external ping at /wp-cron.php, just at a tighter cadence (every minute on Pro for stores that mint a lot of background work).
- Will Crontap fight with the host's own cron?
- wp-cron events are idempotent. If both Crontap and the host hit wp-cron.php in overlapping windows, whichever lands first drains the queue and the other request finds nothing to do. No double-fires.
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