Trouble with cron jobs

If you disabled WP Cron, why would you expect requesting wp-cron.php to work? For server cron to work, you need to enter commands at /etc/crontab/. The crontab command could execute a bash script that does a sequence of commands. But none of them should include wp-cron.php if it has been disabled.

Hi @bcworkz, thanks for your reply. We’ve followed the process outlined here: https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/disable-wp-cron/ which implies that the server cron command should still run even if WP Cron is disabled. Unfortunately I don’t think we have access to /etc/crontab/ due to our hosting setup, but what command would we need to add there if we are able to access it?

I don’t know where DISABLE_WP_CRON is checked, so cannot confirm if requesting wp-cron.php should work or not. Time out problems could mean it doesn’t (the situation may have changed since last August), or something else could be wrong with the events wp-cron.php is executing. WP Control could be responding to DISABLE_WP_CRON itself or maybe there really is something else wrong, IDK.

Adding cron jobs via c-Panel as shown in the kinsta article you linked is tantamount to editing /etc/crontab. You can work around wp cron entirely by creating a callback that handles requests to /wp-admin/admin-post.php?action=your-fn-name. (works sort of like WP Ajax) Make a crontab entry that makes such a request.

Maybe even better is to create an custom REST API route/endpoint that can be requested from crontab. Anyway, the point is to make a direct request to do something without involving WP cron. Because crontab is managing the time intervals, there’s little reason to involve WP cron at all.