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Scheduled Event and Cron Errors

This guide applies to:

  • Basic Edition
  • Plus Edition
  • Pro Edition
  • Business Edition

Introduction

Scheduled Event and Cron errors happen when your site doesn’t run its jobs on time. One of the ways this affects your Booking Calendar is when it comes to notifications.

Sending notification is one of your websites jobs. So these errors can mean there’s a delay in your notifications sending or they’re not sending at all.

What You Might Be Seeing

  • Delayed notifications
  • “Warning  
    Scheduled events  
    A scheduled event (ssa_cron_process_async_actions) has failed to run. Your site still works, but this may indicate that notifications and synchronization with 3rd party services may not work as intended.”
  • “A scheduled event (delete_expired_transients) has failed to run” 

Why You’re Seeing Scheduled Event and Cron Errors

WordPress websites by default run and execute code when someone visits a page on your site. This is setup to avoid wasteful processing power.  

When a visitor goes to your home page, WordPress displays the page and also checks for any background tasks that it should be doing (Ex. Sending your Email Notifications).

WP-Cron is the name of the system in charge of checking for jobs.

If the system needs to send a customer an email notification at 8AM and no one visits your site until 10AM, that means the email notification doesn’t send until 10AM.

If the appointment is at 9AM, then the notification email won’t send out, and they’ll never get that email. 

Sometimes you’ll receive scheduled event errors, when this happens it just means some of the jobs your website needed to run did not execute on time.  

How to Stop Scheduled Event and Cron Errors

Tracking Emails Sent From Your Site

The first step is to download a free plugin to keep track of the emails that your site sends. We recommend using WP Mail Logging by MailPoet: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-mail-logging/ 

Once you’ve installed and activated your plugin, the plugin will immediately start logging your sent emails. 

To find the log, you’re going to go under Tools > WP Mail Log. 

Find WP Mail Log Under the WordPress Dashboard Tools

Before you move on to the next steps, make sure to go back to your calendar and book a test appointment. You could set the email to send to yourself.

In your WP Mail Log You Should See an Admin and Customer Email sent out

Go back to WP Mail log and make sure that all the emails you’re expecting to send out, show up on the log.

Uptime Robot for triggering WP-Cron

There’s a free service called Uptime Robot, that’ll check your website every 5 minutes and trigger WP-Cron. This will make sure your email notifications send out on time. 

Set up a free account with Uptime Robot, here:   https://uptimerobot.com 

After signing up and logging in, you need to Add New Monitor. 

Add a New Monitor in the Uptime Robot Tool

Set the Monitor Type as HTTP(s). Give the Monitor a Friendly Name, such as the name of your site + Cron. And for the URL use the homepage of your site along with wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron added to the end.  

Example URL for Uptime Robot: https://mywebsite.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron

New Monitor Settings, Monitor type is HTTP(s)

You should see the new monitor setup on the left panel, if you click on it it’ll give you more information – like when you started the monitor or if there’s any errors with it. 

Once setup, go back to your calendar and book a test appointment to send an email notification to yourself. After booking, go to WP Mail Log and check to see if you see all your expected emails there.  

If they don’t send immediately, wait about 5 minutes to allow Uptime Robot to trigger WP-Cron.  

Still stuck?

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