The exact server and/or WordPress time shouldn’t matter here. Basically if you schedule a post to be published ten minutes later, it should be published ten minutes later.
It usually helps if you can provide a URL to the site. As there are a couple of things that can be looked at directly. Like what happens when you try to access the /wp-cron.php file directly in a browser? As it should immediately return a blank white page. Also, what happens why you try to access this file directly /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php? As it should immediately return a blank white page with a small 0 (zero) in the upper left.
Also, providing the URL allows us to look up the domain to see if the site is behind a CDN like Cloudflare, Incapsula, Sucuri Firewall, etc. And that may be part of the issue. And/or the site is hosted with a host that is known to disable the WordPress cron.
The first thing to do would be to check for a plugin/theme conflict, by deactivating all plugins and switching to a default theme like TwentyTwenty. Then schedule a post to be published ten minutes later and see if that works.
Also, check in the site’s wp-config.php file to make sure there isn’t a ‘define’ disabling the wp-cron and/or a ‘timeout’.
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);
and/or:
define('WP_CRON_LOCK_TIMEOUT', 120);
Editing wp-config.php
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
Well I would like to say after a few hours, the post seems to have unstuck itself. So it appears the WP CRON was successful eventually.
The site is https://opensource.fan/ if you still think it useful to take a look.
The two defines you mentioned do not exist in my wp-config.php.
The site is not behind any CDN.
The theme is custom written from scratch. But if there is some code I must add to my theme for WP CRON to be activated, it’s very possible I have missed adding it.
> what happens when you try to access the /wp-cron.php
It does return a white page
>what happens why you try to access this file directly /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?
It does return a white page with a 0
The site does not receive a lot of traffic as it’s fairly new and more or less under active development, but even manually visiting the site didn’t appear to activate the CRON either…
>And/or the site is hosted with a host that is known to disable the WordPress cron
This is hosted on a VPS (SSH with root access). They do not do anything special for WordPress hosting. I setup Apache / PHP 7 / MariaDB and installed WordPress and didn’t mess with the generated wp-config.php.
