Overview
You can improve your WordPress site's performance by streamlining its cron jobs — a two-part process that involves creating a new cron job in your DreamHost panel and disabling WP-CRON. This stops WordPress from checking for scheduled events on every page load, which can slow down particularly busy sites.
Background
A cron job is a script or function that is periodically executed at a scheduled time. It can include off-off tasks such as publishing a post or recurring tasks like checking for updates. To help improve performance, WordPress only checks for scheduled items with each page load, which is ideal for low to medium-traffic sites. However, on particularly busy sites, this constant scanning action can actually slow things down quite considerably.
Understanding how WP-CRON works
WP-CRON does not work the same way as a normal cron job. WP-CRON instead checks for scheduled events each time a site page is loaded. This works just fine with a steady stream of moderate traffic, but issues can arise if the traffic is too high or too low:
High traffic — If the site gets too much traffic, it continuously checks its WP-CRON schedule. This increases the work required by the server, which negatively impacts performance.
Low traffic — Conversely, if there is little to no traffic, the site does not check its scheduled items quickly enough and may miss scheduled jobs, such as a backup from a plugin or a scheduled post.
How do I streamline a cron job?
Streamlining a cron job is a two-part process, which includes creating a new cron job and disabling WP-CRON.
Part 1 — Creating a cron job in your DreamHost Panel
If your site is hosted on a DreamPress plan, this is already configured for you. Your server is configured to check for scheduled events every 15 minutes.
Navigate to the Cron Jobs page.
Create a new a new cron job.
Enter the following under Command to run (make sure to replace https://example.com with your domain name):
wget -q -O - https://example.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron
Part 2 — Preventing WordPress from checking for scheduled events on every page load
To disable the WP-CRON service:
Connect to your server using the File Manager.
Right-click the wp-config.php file and select edit.
Just before the
/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */line, insert the following code:define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true) ;
This prevents WP-CRON from executing on page load but not when called directly.
