Why is ?doing_wp_cron being appended to my URLs

Question

I'm finding this string appended to the end of my URLs sometimes:

/?doing_wp_cron

Does anyone know what it for? How can I remove it?

Answer 1

It's a sign that you have ALTERNATE_WP_CRON defined in your wp-config.php

In order to do some background processing (like publishing scheduled posts), WordPress redirects you to the URL with ?doing_wp_cron appended.

Answer 2

I have seen many posts about this problem but few of them succeed to found a real solution. What solves this problem for me has been to manage redirection in the .htaccess file.

Here is an exemple on how to redirect the url by adding these lines in the .htaccess file :

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)doing_wp_cron= [NC]
    RewriteRule (.*) /$1? [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Hope this will help !

Note : this tips comes from this forum

Answer 3

@scribu I believe that BackupBuddy uses WordPress task scheduling to schedule tasks as a part of the backup procedures - if the site has loopbacks disabled then the only solution (apart from some bespoke external solution) and the specific alternate solution that, as I am sure you know, is integrated into WordPress, is the alternate cron fix. So this is only "required" if the host has loopbacks disabled. Bear in mind that if that is the case then no scheduled tasks, be they standard WordPress scheduled tasks or those associated with other plugins, will work. What seems to be the case is that a user will not know that their host has hobbled their WordPress installation until they try BackupBuddy because that makes the problem obvious rather than it having been invisible until that point.

Using crontab type approach is only a sticking-plaster because, unless you make it "ping" the WordPress cron processing very frequently that will only work with some types of scheduled tasks.

Of course if a user doesn't want to or cannot use the alternate wp cron fix, doesn't want to move to a host that does allow loopbacks and isn't knowledgable enough to be able to set up a suitable crontab based capability then BackupBuddy does offer a manual backup mode that will work but it lacks the flexibility ana some of the capabilities of that available when scheduling is available.

Answer 4

What causes this issue is alternate cron. To workaround this, if you have access, you can enable an actual cron process (if your hosting will let you) and disable ALTERNATE_WP_CRON in your wp-config.php.