Another in our series of WordPress Plugin Allstars, WP Crontrol does what its name says – give you control of the WordPress Cron.

“But what is the WordPress Cron,” you may ask? Great question. A Cron is a sort of system timer for servers and apps, and it is the process that controls when system routines, such as running a backup or making a scheduled post live take place.

Crons are definitely an ‘under the hood’ sort of website component, but there are situations when you might have a need to reschedule or remove a cron entry, and in the case of WordPress and its built-in Cron, normally, you are out of luck.

A real-world example of when you might use WP Crontrol happened to one of our client sites. A backup utility was running in the middle off the day, and significantly slowing down page speed.

This impacted both user experience and would also be noticed by search engine algorithms, potentially affecting search page rankings. Not good.

Unfortunately, the backup utility did not offer a setting to change when it ran. It looked like an unsolvable problem, or at least one that would have required a change in the tool we were using for backups.

Enter WP Crontol.

Suddenly, precise control was at our fingertips. We were able to change the backup initiation time to the wee hours of the morning, and the problem was solved.

For what would have been a complex, time consuming and potentially risky undertaking, WP Crontrol provided a clear and easy to understand interface for adjusting the WP Cron.

Even better, WP Crontrol allows you not only to change the time a Cron runs, but also to delete them and also create new ones.

The purpose of our blog’s WordPress Plugin Allstars is simply to identify what we feel are the best-in-class (or sometimes singular and indispensable WordPress Plugins. WP Cron is a worthy member of this group!

You can check out WP Cron on the WordPress.org plugin depository at this link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-crontrol/