How often should wp-cron.php run?
How often do you update or tend to your website?
As a rule if you only check your website once a day, then run wp-cron.php once a day. If you find that you are getting a LOT of spam comments and Akismet is not keeping on top of it, then you may want to set it to every 6 hours or so.
Even if you were constantly working on a very busy site you would probably only want things to be processed every 30 minutes at the most.
WordPress tries to schedule its own activities using a wp-cron.php script. Unfortunately this script gets called to run every time a visitor comes to your site and can cause high usage.
You should setup a cron job that will only call wp-cron.php less often, something like every 4-6 hours works well.
0 */5 * * * cd /home/username/public_html; php -q wp-cron.php
* * * * * command to be executed - - - - - | | | | | | | | | +----- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0) | | | +------- month (1 - 12) | | +--------- day of month (1 - 31) | +----------- hour (0 - 23) +------------- min (0 - 59) |
Then you’ll want to open up your wp-config.php file and add the following entry to it to disable the default wp-cron from running:
/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', 'true');The disable line must be before this statement:
/ That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. /
Like so:
define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, ‘true’);
/ That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. /
If you need help adding a crontab we can add one for you.
