Heartbeat control

The heartbeat API is how WordPress powers post locking, autosave notifications and live dashboard updates. It works by sending a request to admin-ajax.php on a timer – every fifteen seconds while the post editor is open, and every sixty seconds elsewhere in the admin.

This feature lets you change that. You can switch the heartbeat off on the front end entirely, and set the interval to anything from 15 to 300 seconds. Vectro applies that interval wherever the heartbeat runs, and it never switches the heartbeat off inside wp-admin.

Be aware of the trade-off before setting a long interval. Post locking – the warning that another user is already editing a post – depends on the heartbeat, and a long interval makes that warning slower to appear. On a multi-author site it is worth keeping the interval modest.

Each heartbeat is a full PHP request: WordPress bootstraps, loads plugins, runs the AJAX handler and responds. One editor left open for an hour generates 240 of them. On shared hosting, where admin-ajax.php requests are often the first thing to hit a resource limit, that is a meaningful and entirely avoidable load.

The cost scales with how many people have the editor open. On a site with several authors working simultaneously, heartbeat traffic can be a substantial share of total server requests – all of it background polling rather than anyone actually loading a page.

The heartbeat posts to admin-ajax.php with the heartbeat action. WordPress and plugins hook that request to check whether a post is locked by another user, confirm the login session is still valid, and refresh dashboard widgets.

Vectro filters the heartbeat settings to change the interval, and unregisters the heartbeat script on front-end pages if you turn on Disable Heartbeat on Frontend. Plugins that rely on the heartbeat for their own live updates will be affected in proportion to how far you reduce it.