Scheduled jobs
On this page
Some work is done in the background: sending queued e-mails, publishing scheduled posts, cleaning up. One cron line runs all of it.
The cron line
cPanel → Cron Jobs → Once per minute (* * * * *):
php /home/USER/public_html/cron.phpAdmin → Cron shows the exact line for your server, with the right path, and a Copy button. Some hosts call the command php-cli or need the full path, for example /usr/local/bin/php.
When the host does not allow the php command
Use the web address instead. Your host's URL cron, or a free ping service such as cron-job.org or UptimeRobot, can open it every minute:
https://your-site/cron?key=YOUR-KEYThe address with your key is shown on Admin → Cron. Regenerate the key makes a new one and switches the old address off.
When there is no cron at all
The site still does the work. With Run light cron jobs from page views on (it is on by default), a visitor's page quietly starts the jobs that are due. That keeps a small site working. A real cron line is better for a busy one, because e-mails then leave on time even when nobody is visiting.
The jobs
| Job | Runs | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Send queued e-mails | every minute | up to 40 e-mails per run |
| Publish scheduled posts | every minute | posts whose time has come |
| Remove old sessions and tokens | hourly | expired sign-ins and links |
| Clean temporary uploads | hourly | files uploaded but never posted |
| Check the licence | twice a day | asks the licence site |
| Prune old notifications | daily | older than the days set on Settings → Security |
| Prune logs | daily | old sign-in rows, large log files |
| Birthday reminders | daily | tells friends about today's birthdays |
| Repair counters | daily | friend, follower and post counts |
| Look up visitor countries | every 2 minutes | asks ip-api.com for the country of new visitor addresses (off with the visitor setting) |
| Prune visitor rows | daily | page-view rows older than the days set on Visitor analytics → Settings; the daily totals stay |
| Seed What's new entries | daily | adds the notes of a new version to the What's new page |
| Build the sitemap | daily | sitemap.xml for search engines |
Plugins add their own jobs to this list (story clean-up, ad budgets, message retention and so on). They are marked Plugin in the table on the page.
On the Cron page
- Run every job now, or Run now beside one job, starts it at once and shows what it did.
- The switch beside a job turns that job off. Press Save switches.
- Status says Healthy when cron called the site recently and Not running when it did not. Not running means the cron line is not working: check the path and that the line starts with
php. - Last 50 runs lists what ran, how long it took and what it answered. An error shows here in red.
Sitemap
The sitemap lives at https://your-site/sitemap.xml. Add that address in Google Search Console once.