Snagbane Cron Monitor

If your scheduled posts are not publishing, your backups stopped running, or a plugin says its task is “queued” and never gets further, the usual advice is the same everywhere: check whether WP-Cron is disabled, trigger it by hand, install something that pings it once and calls it a day. None of that answers the actual question, which is whether your scheduled tasks are really not running, or whether your site is simply quiet.

That distinction is the whole problem. WP-Cron is not a real system cron. It only fires when somebody visits the site, so a low-traffic site naturally goes hours between ticks. That is not the same thing as a backup silently failing for a week — but most cron checkers treat the two identically, and you get either constant false alarms on a quiet site or a real failure nobody notices.

Cron Monitor watches two separate signals instead of one:

• A heartbeat — has WP-Cron actually run recently at all?
• A per-task grace window — did each individually scheduled event fire within a reasonable time of when it was due?

Together those tell “cron is fine, the site is just quiet” apart from “cron is genuinely stuck”, and you get one plain sentence rather than a timestamp to interpret:

• Working — cron ran recently and tasks are firing.
• Running late — a little behind. Often normal on a low-traffic site.
• Not working — the site had visitors, which normally trigger cron, and it still has not run.
• Not enough data yet — just installed, no baseline yet.
• Cannot record anything — the plugin could not create the table it keeps history in, usually a database user without permission to create tables. It says so rather than reporting an all-clear it has no basis for.

A site deliberately running a real server crontab with DISABLE_WP_CRON set is recognised as the healthy setup it is, rather than reported as broken because WordPress is not the one spawning the request.

What you get

• The honest verdict above, on its own admin page and as a dashboard widget.
• A 30-day history of every scheduled task this site ran or missed, fully paginated. Everything kept is shown; there is no cap on either.
• Multisite support, including sites created after the plugin was network-activated.
• No configuration. It starts watching the moment you activate it.
• Available in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Brazilian Portuguese.

Free vs. Pro

Everything described above is free, on every install, with no cap, no time limit and no nag screens. There is no locked feature anywhere in this plugin.

Snagbane Cron Monitor Pro is a separate, optional add-on (not included in this download and not distributed through WordPress.org). It does things this plugin does not do at all:

• Why it broke, not just that it broke. Runs the checks a developer would run by hand: whether this site can reach its own wp-cron.php, whether something is answering that request with a password prompt or a refusal, whether the run lock is stuck, and whether scheduled events belong to a plugin that is no longer installed. Each answer comes with the specific next step.
• Which plugin is responsible for any given task, by name.
• What your tasks cost — duration and peak memory for every run, ranked by total time, with a per-day trend that catches a task getting slower as the data underneath it grows.
• Tasks that start and never finish — the case a “did it run” check reports as a success, and the reason everything scheduled behind it never gets its turn.
• “Run now” for any overdue task, without waiting for the next tick.
• Email and webhook alerts (Slack, Discord and anything else that accepts an incoming webhook), de-duplicated so a stuck task tells you once rather than every few minutes.

Pro is available from cronmonitor.snagbane.com and requires this free plugin to be installed and active.

External Services

This plugin connects to one external service:

Freemius, our licensing and update platform. The Freemius SDK is used to check for updates, apply the Free/Pro state, and — only if you opt in on first activation — share basic, non-personal usage and site data used to improve the plugin. This connects to freemius.com. No data is sent unless you activate the plugin, and the optional opt-in can be declined without affecting anything. See the Freemius Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

The plugin makes no other outbound requests. Its detection runs entirely on your own server, observing your own site’s existing WP-Cron activity.