Background

Most shared hosts support cron jobs functionality within their control panel. These are real cron jobs triggered within the server/operating system level of your hosts (e.g. Linux) that differ from native WordPress cron jobs. These cron jobs ensure it will fire on your specified schedule.

This is unlike WordPress cron which waits for a page load event (from a website visitor). This type of cron execution ensures that your automatic backup will run according to your preferred schedule.

Configuring this is super easy as long as this feature is supported by your hosts.

Disable WP Cron

Since you now are using the hosting cron to trigger your WordPress site cron jobs. You don’t anymore need the native WordPress WP-Cron – so you can safely disable it by adding this constant to your wp-config.php (if it’s not disabled yet):

define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true );

Enable cron job in your hosting

Each hosting has its way of showing how their customers can create cron jobs (inside their own hosting panel). As an example – let’s show how to enable cron jobs inside a Hostinger shared hosting account. Let’s assume you want to call your WordPress cron script every 5 minutes to ensure that it will keep all your cron jobs up to date as possible (including Prime Mover PRO automatic backup jobs).

If you are in different hosts – procedures should be similar but to be sure, please check your hosting documentation.

  • Login to your Hostinger shared account hosting panel.
  • Go to the Website control panel (if you have several websites in your account).
  • Navigate to Advanced -> Cron Jobs
  • You should be able to see “Create a New Cron Job” form.
  • Make sure “PHP” is selected.
  • Under “Command to run” enter: public_html/wp-cron.php

So the entire command to run looks like this:

/usr/bin/php /home/uXXXXXXXXX/public_html/wp-cron.php

Hostinger asks you to enter the path to your WordPress cron PHP file.

  • Let’s schedule a call to your cron script for every 5 minutes. To configure this, under “minute” field select “Every 5 minutes (*/5)“.
  • Under “hour” field, select “Every Hour (*)” .
  • Under “day” field, select “Every Day (*)“.
  • Under “month” field, select “Every Month (*)“.
  • Under “weekDay” field, select “Every Weekday (*)“.

This is what it looks like after filling up all the values in the above settings and before you will click “Save”. Note that “{account#}” is unique for each hosting account so it’s not shown in the screenshot below.

  • Finally hit the Save button. This should officially enable the cron job. You should see a notice that “Cron job created successfully.“
  • Under “List of cron jobs”. You should see your added cron job. This how it looks like:
Created with GIMP

You have just created a system-based cron (using your hosting cron) that will call your WordPress script every 5 minutes. This will ensure you are keeping all of your website cron jobs up to date (including auto-backups).

Enable cron via the command line

If you don’t have a hosting panel for adding cron jobs but only a command line solution – yes this is also possible. This assumes you are on a Linux web hosting (Debian or Ubuntu which is common) and offers root access to the command line where you can add your cron jobs. This also assumes you know how to use the command line tools e.g. VIM editor, etc.

To do this:

  • Log in to your web server via the command line.
  • Edit crontab by issuing this command:

sudo crontab -e

  • Once you are in a cron tab editor, you can directly enter your cron jobs, for example to call the WordPress cron script every minute:
*/1 * * * * wget --delete-after http://yoursite.tld/wp-cron.php

Make sure to replace yoursite.tld with your own domain (e.g. single-site) or your main site domain (if multisite). For example, we’ve done this with a WordPress VM Bitnami instance (which only comes with command line tools to manage cron jobs). This is what it looks like after adding the above cron job command:

  • Exit the cron tab editor and save.
  • If you have root access – you can restart your cron jobs by issuing this command:

sudo systemctl restart cron

That’s it! For more details – you can read the official WordPress cron guidelines on setting up cron jobs using the system scheduler or command line:

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