Simply Static provides a simple UI to run exports of different kinds (Full Exports, Single Exports, Build Exports). It also can be executed via WP-Cron to run the static export as a background process without being limited by your server’s timeout limits.
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How WP-Cron works with Simply Static
By default, each static export you start from within Simply Static is a one-time event. Once the execution is finished, it gets unscheduled from WP-Cron to keep your cron jobs low and prevent any unwanted static exports.
Wp-Crontrol – manage Crons easily
Wp-Crontrol is a powerful plugin to visually manage your cron jobs within WordPress. Install and activate it and navigate to Tools->Cron Events.
Create a Cron event for Simply Static
In Tools->Cron Events, click on “Add new” to create a new event. Add a name for your event and choose a recurrence (interval) for your event and click on “Add Event”. In this example, I used “my_simply_static_cron_event” as the event name and decided to run the event hourly.
Attach the export function to your Cron event
Now that we have a cron event, the last step is adding a function to it to trigger static exports with Simply Static. Remember, we named our cron event “my_simply_static_cron_event” – that’s the hook we need to use to add our logic.
You can add this to the functions.php of your child theme or use the Code Snippets plugin to add it to your website.
Now Simply Static will execute a full static export every hour. You can also check that the cron job is running and scheduled correctly by searching for the event name in Tools->Cron Events like so:
