WordPress health and cron checks in Shadow

WordPress's own Site Health results and the PHP version, plus the scheduled-task (cron) checks that decide whether background jobs actually run.

There are 7 checks in this family. Shadow reports what it finds, and nothing is changed until you approve a fix.

In this family

Cron Health
Cron Overlap Protection Enabled
External Cron Configured
PHP Version
Site Health Criticals Addressed
System Cron Offload
WP Cron Traffic Dependence

What each check looks at

Cron Health

Checks whether WordPress scheduled events are running on time and that the cron queue has not grown excessively large due to scheduling failures or plugin cron bloat.

Why it matters. Inspects the WordPress cron array to detect events that are significantly overdue (more than 30 minutes late), and flags when the total number of registered scheduled events exceeds a healthy threshold (cron bloat).

Cron Overlap Protection Enabled

Checks for a stale WP-Cron lock that indicates a crashed cron process is blocking all future scheduled task execution.

External Cron Configured

Checks whether WordPress scheduled events are running on time, detecting signs that WP-Cron may be unreliable without a real external cron setup.

PHP Version

Checks whether the server is running a supported, actively maintained PHP version with current security patches.

Site Health Criticals Addressed

Checks the WordPress Site Health screen results for unresolved critical issues that require immediate attention.

System Cron Offload

Checks whether WordPress WP-Cron has been offloaded to a real system cron job, preventing missed or page-load-delayed scheduled tasks.

WP Cron Traffic Dependence

Checks whether WP-Cron fires inline during page loads (traffic-dependent), which adds latency for visitors and causes tasks to be missed on low-traffic sites.

The other check families

Shadow is free and runs on your own server, with no account. The source is on GitHub, and these descriptions come from it.