WordPress – Completely disable Heartbeat Control

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

If you are having speed issues with your WordPress website then you may find that this is because of the the heartbeat control that is within the WordPress software. Running speed checks on your website like PingDom may reveal that your admin-ajax.php is taking ages to load.

So, what do you do about it?

It really depends on your own situation – if you have multiple administrators on your site that you will not want to disable this feature but you can stop it checking every 15 seconds and change it to 60 seconds by using Heartbeat Control plugin.

But like most blogging websites you are the only person making any changes to your own website, then you may want to consider disabling the ajax completely. To do this, you need to make a change to your functions.php file – so, please be careful, one wrong move and you can completely disable your site so don’t come crying to us if you do screw it up!!

In your WordPress Administrator Console, browse your way to Themes > Editor then select the Theme Functions (functions.php) file. This will bring up the file edit and you should now add the following code straight after the <?php part at the top of the text:

add_action( ‘init’, ‘stop_heartbeat’, 1 );
function stop_heartbeat() {
wp_deregister_script(‘heartbeat’);
}

Click the Update File button underneath the text box and this will completely disable the ajax function on your website.

NOTE: If you are currrently using Heartbeat Control or any other heartbeat plugin – disable it and delete it before making any of the above changes or your site will crash.

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