How to Enable WP Cron

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This post will quickly over how to enable WP Cron and why it can be useful to have it disabled as well.

What is WP Cron

WP Cron is a function of WordPress that runs background tasks to check for plugin updates, publishing scheduled posts and many other things.  It does this by checking for background tasks that need to be run on each page load.  This can be very useful if you need to perform background tasks on your site, but it can also be a performance killer if your background tasks are long and you receive a lot of traffic.

By default this option is enabled since there are WordPress features that rely on WP Cron.

Why should I Disable WP Cron

Since there are performance concerns for high traffic sites some site owners will sacrifice some the default WordPress background tasks for faster page loads.  This is a viable option for some sites but not the best option for all sites.

Why should I Enable WP Cron

If you have a personal blog or run a website that does not have tremendously high levels of traffic then you will benefit more form enabling WP Cron.  This will give you access to all the background tasks form WordPress and other plugins that rely on WP Cron, like our own Content Resharer Pro.

How to Enable and Disable WP Cron

You can enable WP Cron by editing your wp-config.php and adding define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', false); anywhere above the /* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

If DISABLE_WP_CRON is already defined as true within the wp-config.php file then you can just set it to false.