The scheduler in my WordPress installation is not working – what should I do?

WordPress has a system for running scheduled tasks in the background. This does lots of useful things – things like clearing up internals (the equivalent of taking out the garbage), checking for available updates, and performing actions that plugins want doing at a set time, or regularly (like backups!).

If you have received a notice that your WordPress scheduler does not seem to be running tasks, then this page is for you.

Firstly, if nobody has visited your site for a while, then this situation is expected. WordPress only gets the opportunity to do things when people visit pages. No pages = WordPress is never called upon = WordPress cannot kick off any background tasks. So, if your site is a development site, or has been moth-balled for some other reason, then this message is not surprising. Visit a few pages, and the message should go away. If not…

If you weren’t expecting this message, then take a look at this article. It’s an article about why scheduled backups don’t run. (If your scheduler is not working, then this is one of the results – but it won’t just be UpdraftPlus scheduled tasks that aren’t running; it’ll be all of them). All the reasons we’ve ever come across (after over ten million downloads of UpdraftPlus!) for a scheduler not working are in it.

Posted in: Troubleshooting

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