WPNotif sends newsletter messages in batches and not all of them at once immediately, as this can be resource heavy for your server which can crash your website, all email newsletter plugins work the same way.
Websites are dumb and if you want to set up an automated task to run at some specific time then they can’t do it unless something tells them to do it at that particular time or triggers them at that scheduled time and that is what Cron Job does, its job is to tell the website that the time has come and they need to perform something.
TL;DR Cron Method = Automatic Trigger
Sending Frequency
This is the number of messages you want to send per minute, the default value is set to 5 as most people use Shared Hosting and they have limited processing resources, but you can try increasing this value as per your server configuration and see what value works best for you.
You can set the WPNotif cron method from our settings General –> Newsletter
WPNotif Cron Methods
WPNotif provides 3 methods for cron job, or automating the trigger for sending messages in the newsletter and you can understand about them by reading the below article and see which one works best for you
WordPress Cron Job
This runs as a temporary background process and only gets triggered when someone visits your website (page load). So if you schedule your newsletter to 6 PM and no one visits your website till 9 PM then this will start running at 9 PM as it depends on someone to load the website.
Recommended if
– you don’t care about exact timing
– you don’t schedule and run newsletter at the time of the creation
WPNotif Cron Job (Recommended)
This is a server-side job which runs frequently to trigger the task, this is the most common method used out there to perform these type of tasks, not just with WPNotif but for any automated scheduled task.
This requires some setup from your side (trust us, it’s simple), which is described in this article How to setup WPNotif Server Side Cron Job
WPNotif Background Task
This runs as a non-stop background process and does not depend on site-visiters or some external source. This method is very accurate with timing but uses little server resources and it may not be compatible with some hosting providers as this requires constant CPU processing. Even though this is not CPU intensive but it requires constance CPU cycles and some hosting providers may not like it, so please check with your host if they allow this or about their CPU minutes limit.
Recommended if
– you don’t want to rely on your website visitors
– your website doesn’t have a high number of visitors