Schedule your WordPress on autopilot

The commands you run manually should run themselves

You run a backup every week. You optimize images after every batch upload. You scan for broken links once a month. You clear revisions when you remember to. Each task takes a minute, but remembering to do it — and actually doing it consistently — is where things fall apart.

Cron Schedules takes any command you'd run manually and puts it on a timer. You pick the command, set the interval, and walk away. WordPress's built-in cron system handles the execution. Results are logged so you can review what happened without being there when it ran.

Weekly backup with cleanup

The most valuable schedule you can set up. Every Sunday at 3am, create backup runs with the -remove_old flag. The previous week's backup is deleted, a fresh one is created. There's always exactly one current backup on disk.

You never think about backups again. If something breaks on Tuesday, the backup from Sunday is there. If the hosting provider has a server failure, your ZIP has everything.

Daily broken link scan

Scan broken links processes 50 posts per run and remembers where it stopped. Schedule it daily and it works through the entire site over time. A site with 350 posts is fully audited in a week. After that, the scan cycles back to the beginning and catches anything that broke since the last pass.

Instead of finding out about broken links from an SEO audit or an angry reader three months later, you catch them within 24 hours.

Weekly image optimization

Content editors upload images without compressing them. It's not malice — they just don't think about it. Schedule optimize images weekly and every new upload gets compressed automatically on the next run. Page speed stays consistent without relying on editors to remember.

Add the -webp flag if your server supports it. Every new JPEG and PNG gets a WebP sidecar alongside the compressed original.

Weekly alt text fill

Same logic as image optimization. Editors upload images without filling in alt text. Schedule add image alt texts weekly. It fills in missing alt text from captions, titles, and filenames. Images that already have alt text are skipped. The media library stays accessible and SEO-friendly without manual effort.

Monthly revision cleanup

Revisions accumulate quietly. A monthly clear revisions run deletes everything that's piled up. Combined with a startup command that limits revisions to 5 per post, the database stays lean indefinitely.

On a WooCommerce store where products get edited frequently, this single schedule can shave tens of thousands of rows from the database over a year.

Monday morning product export

If your team needs a current product spreadsheet every week — for marketing, inventory, or reporting — schedule export products CSV for Monday at 8am. The CSV is ready in the exports directory when they start their day. No "can you send me the latest product list?" emails.

How to set up a schedule

1. Open TrueCommander → Scheduled Commands
2. Click Create Scheduled Command
3. Select the command and set its parameters
4. Choose the interval: every minute, hourly, twice daily, daily, weekly, or monthly
5. Save. The command runs on the next interval.

Each scheduled run is logged with its result, so you can check what happened without being online when it ran. Failed runs show the error message so you know what went wrong.

The recommended setup

If you manage WordPress sites professionally, here's the schedule that covers everything:

Five scheduled commands. Zero ongoing effort. The site maintains itself.