How to Replace wp_cron from your WordPress site with Real Cron / Server Side Cron?

Changing wp-cron with your own cron job can help you to run your website’s scheduled tasks extra reliably. Also, it will decrease the stress on your web server, if you have a high-traffic website.

Wp-cron is a feature of WordPresss which is in charge of regulating your site’s time-sensitive tasks.

For example, let’s say you scheduled an article to be published on Wednesday at 9:30 AM. Wp-cron launches this process automatically when the right time arrives (or at the least, as near “on time” as possible).

In addition to this, WordPress relies on wp_cron to manage multiple schedule-sensitive parts of the your site.

The big difference is that wp-cron only executes when you or another person visits your website (either on the front-end or in your dashboard). Whenever someone visits your site, WordPress will run the wp-cron.php file and check for scheduled tasks. If there is a task, it will then execute it.

There are two reasons behind disabling wp-cron and replacing it with your own dedicated cron job:

Reliability – as the example above illustrated, wp-cron isn’t always reliable on low-traffic sites because it needs a website visit to execute. With a real cron job, you can set your tasks to execute every X minutes no matter what – even if there are no visits.
Performance – on high-traffic sites, some people don’t like wp-cron because WordPress will run the wp-cron.php file on almost every single visit. WordPress tries to limit this by not running it more than once per 60 seconds, but there can still be performance drags for various technical reasons, such as simultaneous visits both triggering wp-cron.

Now that you know the “what” and “why”, let’s get into the “how.” We’ll show you how to disable wp-cron and then replace it with your own server cron job (or another solution).

There are two parts to the process:

1. You need to disable the built-in wp-cron feature so that WordPress doesn’t run wp-cron.php on every visit. To do this, you just need to add a line of code to your site’s wp-config.php file.
2. You need to set up your own cron job to call wp-cron.php on the schedule that you set. With this, you can run wp-cron.php on a specific schedule, whether or not your site receives traffic.

Check the above video for info on how to replace wp cron with server side cron.