Cron Pulse

The problem

WordPress developers fly blind with WP-Cron. Core gives you no visibility into whether a scheduled job actually ran, how long it took, or when it last fired. On a client site I maintained, a nightly cleanup job had silently stopped running weeks earlier. Nothing errored, nothing logged, nothing told anyone. I only found out because a database table had quietly grown past what the host's storage plan allowed. There was no dashboard to check, so there was no way to know until something else broke downstream.

The approach

I built Cron Pulse to turn that blind spot into a glance. It adds a dashboard under Tools, Cron Pulse, that lists every scheduled job with its recurrence, next run time, last run time, and execution duration, color-coded Healthy, Overdue, Failing, or Pending so problems are visible immediately, not buried in a log file. An admin bar badge surfaces issues on every page load without anyone needing to remember to check. From there I kept adding the pieces I kept wanting on other projects: Run Now to fire a hook on demand for testing, Unschedule for stuck or duplicate events, a persistent execution log with duration sparklines so a creeping timeout is visible before it becomes one, and email or webhook alerts after N consecutive failures with a built-in SMTP option so alert delivery doesn't depend on a host's half-broken mail() function. WP-CLI and a read-only REST endpoint cover the cases where wp-admin isn't where you want the answer. It's pure PHP and vanilla jQuery on purpose, zero external dependencies, so it stays fast and doesn't become the next thing that needs debugging.

Who it helps

For agencies maintaining several client sites, checking whether the nightly backup or sync job actually ran stops being a guess and becomes a glance at the admin bar. For a solo developer debugging a broken scheduled email or import, Run Now plus the execution log turns trial-and-error into reading a number. As of 1.2.0 it also surfaces failing or overdue jobs directly in WordPress's own Site Health screen, and sends a recovery notification when a job that was failing starts working again, so you find out when something fixes itself, not only when it breaks.