Otter Boyd

Thank you Stefano,

After running the external cron job for 24 hours I continue to see the trigger interval average time increasing. Yesterday when I wrote the original post above it was at 488 seconds, and at this moment is at 911 seconds and continues to rise each time I check on it.

Last night I disabled all plugins except Newsletter, and put my site in maintenance mode. Having all other plugins disabled had no effect on this cron issue.

Earlier in the week, before discovering that Hostgator doesn’t allow crons running more frequently than once every 15 minutes, I set up a once-per-minute cron in cpanel using the following command:

wget -q -O – https://(MYDOMAIN dot com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1

Incredibly it worked and continued to work until Hostgator detected it and throttled it down to once per 17 minutes. During the hours that the once per minute cron was working I could see the cron interval average on the Newsletter status page steadily decreasing until it finally fell within the 300 seconds range.

Unfortunately Hostgator finally did detect the cron and reset it to once per 17 minutes. It was at this point that I set up an external trigger with cron-job.org following the directions you have provided (and as described in the original post).

With the short term success I had with a cpanel cron job I have confirmed that my theme and plugins are not the problem.

Now I am left wondering if the cron job initiated by cron-job.org isn’t producing the necessary trigger, or is working as expected but Newsletter isn’t detecting it. According to my account on cron-job.org all jobs have been successful and always return a “200 OK” status.

The cron I set up is quite simple: https://(MYDOMAIN dot com)/wp-cron.php
Request Method: GET

for testing purposes (to see impact on interval average on Newsletter status page) I’ve set it up for once per minute, and have also tried extended periods at once per 2 minutes and once per 5 minutes.

All externally run cron jobs I’ve tried from cron-job.org are having zero effect on the Newsletter status page warning for the cron interval average. When I began this reply today that interval was at 911 seconds, and now is at 915, and that is with a once per minute external cron still running from cron-job.org.

I have exhausted all ideas and don’t know what to try next. Any idea about what might be going on? Thanks Stefano!

betumayo, I used a the “WP Rollback” plugin to rollback to the previous version of the theme. The instructions with the rollback plugin gives numerous warnings about the damage it can do in some cases, so if you use it be careful. In my case there were no problems. Just one click and the theme got rolled back to the previous version and my lightbox problem vanished.

Thank you Kevin, I love that solution! That is exactly what I was trying to do with the topbar.

Regarding the sitewide banner width, your response suggests that the theme is so flexible that there really isn’t an ideal width that needs to be filled, rather it’s a matter of going with whatever looks best. It is great that the theme is so flexible!

My site is otterboyd.com. For the sitewide banner I went with 1170 pixels wide to match the minimum width suggested for a slider. That width seems to span the page width nicely. I previously tried a banner at around 1000 pixels wide and found it didn’t quite span the whole page. That made me wonder if there were particular dimensions I need to aim for when creating banners. It seems that as long as it’s at least 1170px wide like a slider it should be fine.

Thank you for resolving these questions so quickly. I have one other question regarding the clipping of a small image on the main page but I imagine you might prefer if I create a new topic to ask that question. Thank you Kevin!