Scan Scheduling

VMP Security runs scans on a schedule so that issues do not have to wait for someone to remember to look. By default the schedule is automatic and chosen for you, which is the right starting point for most sites. The Scheduling page is where you override that default if you have a reason — for example, you want scans to happen at a known time so you can correlate them with other operations.

In This Article

• The default schedule
• Setting a custom schedule
• Manual scan runs
• Missed scans and catch-up

The default schedule

By default the plugin runs a scan once a week, with the exact run times jittered across the day so that not every site runs scans at the same moment. For most sites a weekly cadence is the right setup; you can change it to daily, twice-daily, weekdays-only, or weekends-only from the schedule pattern dropdown described below.

The Scan Options and Scheduling page shows the next scheduled scan time and the time of the last completed scan. If the last scan ran much earlier than expected, something is preventing scans from completing — check the Scan Troubleshooting article.

Setting a custom schedule

Custom scheduling is available to all users (free and Premium). With it you can pin scans to specific days and times, which is useful when:

• You want scans to happen during a known low-traffic window so they do not contend with peak traffic.
• You correlate scans with other operations — backups, deploys, content publishing — and want them to run at a known time relative to those.
• You have a host-side maintenance window when other heavy operations run, and you want scans to fit inside it.
• You want different cadences on different days — for example, daily scans Monday through Friday but no weekend scans.

To set a custom schedule:

1. Open VMP Security → Scan and click Scan Options and Scheduling.
2. In the Scan Scheduling section, switch Schedule mode from Automatic (“Let VMP Security choose when to scan”) to Manual (“Manually schedule scans”).
3. Choose a Schedule pattern: Once Daily, Twice Daily, Weekly, Weekdays Only, Weekends Only, or Custom Schedule.
4. If you chose Custom Schedule, fill in the start hour, day-of-week, and start date controls that appear.
5. Click SAVE CHANGES. The new schedule takes effect on the next WP-Cron tick.

Scheduled slots that fall too close together will collapse into a single scan; the scan engine prevents two scans from running concurrently.

Manual scan runs

You can always trigger a scan immediately from the main Scan page, regardless of what is scheduled. Click Start a new scan and the scanner queues a run. If a scheduled scan is already in progress, the manual button instead nudges the running scan to report progress more frequently and does not start a second one.

Manual runs are useful any time you have a reason to want fresh data: after applying a security update, after restoring from backup, or just because you want to confirm the site is currently clean before doing something noisy on it.

Missed scans and catch-up

If a scheduled scan is missed — for example, because the site was down at the time, or because a previous scan ran long — the plugin runs the next scan as soon as it is able to. There is no “catch-up” that runs all the missed scans at once. The scanner’s job is to give you a current picture of the site, and a single fresh scan does that as well as ten of them would.

If a scan reliably fails to start at its scheduled time, the most common cause is that the WordPress cron system is not running on this site. Most hosting environments handle this automatically, but on some setups (where requests to the site are sparse, or where the host disables WP-Cron) you may need to install a real cron job that calls wp-cron.php on a schedule. The Scan Troubleshooting article walks through how to verify this.