how to solve problems with WordPress repeated redirects to doing_wp_cron

The problem

We’ve all seen it, too many pages redirecting to something like http://site.com.au/mypage/?doing_wp_cron=1477824.660555215148781250

You either put up with it, and hope it goes away, or you try disabling plugins 1 by 1.

You might even go looking in cpanel or linux for the cronjob responsible. But alas, it’s a WordPress cronjob.

What are WordPress cron jobs ?

A WordPress cronjob is a scheduled task.

A plugin or theme – most often a plugin – schedules a task to run in the future. Like an hour , or a day into the future.

Then WordPress page requests come in, and WordPress checks the list of cronjobs – and if any have their timer expired WordPress runs that cronjob as well as the page request.

If it’s happening too often, it could be caching somewhere.

But it’s most likely a plugin gone crazy and scheduled a task to run too often.

The Solution

I use this plugin

https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-cron-manager/

It will give you visibility of the cronjobs. Look at the top of the list, of what is about to be executed. It gives a name of the task, which is developer friendly, but you can often guess which plugin it’s from.

You can then fix the problem at the plugin level, either settings in the plugin, or disabling the plugin, or reinstalling the plugin.

By Scott Farrell on November 10th, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress