How to Set Up a Cron Job on WordPress

What is a Cron Job?

A Cron job is a task that is scheduled to run at a specific time automatically. For example, a Cron job can back up a file every six hours automatically.
FS Poster is using the standard WordPress Cron Jobs for background shares and Scheduled posts. The default WordPress Cron Jobs might cause delays in your Schedules or background shares. Because, by default, WordPress does not use a real Cron job. Instead, whenever a page is loaded on a WordPress site by any user, WordPress runs the Cron Job Tasks. If nobody visits your WordPress site, your tasks will not run. As a result, your scheduled tasks will delay.

To resolve these issues, you should configure a real Cron job on your website. To do this, follow the instruction below:

1. Go to the FS Poster > Settings > General settings and scroll all the way down to the Cron Job settings;

2. Enable the option to ignore the default Cron job for FS Poster. You do not need to worry because the default Cron job will still work for your other plugins;

3. Copy the Cron Job command for your website;

4. Log in to Cpanel. If your hosting does not has the Cpanel, please contact your hosting provider to get help to create the Cron job;

5. Go to Cron Jobs;

6. Configure a real Cron Job on WordPress by adding the command that we copied earlier from the plugin to the command section. If you want the schedules to share posts at the exact time you defined on the schedule module, you need to set the Cron Job every minute. For example, if you set it 10 minutes, it means it can delay up to 10 minutes:

If your server does not accept this Linux command because some characters are not allowed on your server, you can add one of the below commands. Please copy your website name from the search bar of the browser and replace the https://www.fs-poster.com/ with your domain name in the command:

curl --silent --output /dev/null https://www.fs-poster.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron

curl https://www.fs-poster.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron

wget -O /dev/null https://www.fs-poster.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron

After setting up the Cron Jobs, you can see the result by going to FS Poster > Settings > General settings > Cron Job section. You can see how many minute(s) ago the last Cron Job ran. If it shows that it ran a long time ago, it means that the Cron Job does not run properly, and you need to contact your hosting provider to solve the Cron job running issue.