Monitoring WordPress Cron via heartbeat checks
Part of my onboarding process and performance optimization for new sites is setting up proper server-level scheduled cron jobs using wp-cli. I use Kinsta hosting for clients and internal sites here at Sprucely Designed and, while they have an excellent hosting stack preconfigured out of the box, they don’t disable the stock WP-Cron or configure a system cron to my liking. So, based on Kinsta’s own knowledgebase recommendations, this is one of the first optimizations I make for new sites. First, I disable the default WP Cron, by adding this line to the site’s wp-config.php. On Kinsta hosting, this won’t completely disable the cron because Kinsta has a default server cron setup within crontab that performs a curl request to wp-cron.php?server_triggered_cronjob every 15 minutes. They do this as a backup to the default WP cron …
