CRON

Imports, downloads and token renewals run on WP-Cron, the scheduler built into WordPress. WP-Cron runs when someone visits the site; on a quiet site scheduled jobs wait for the next visitor, and background jobs that the site triggers by calling itself need the host to allow such loopback requests.

What the plugin schedules

Job	Interval
Sync of all accounts	Every 2 hours, five accounts per run
Refresh of one stale account	Every 5 minutes (an account is stale after 3 hours, RSS after 1 hour)
Creation of imported items and download of their media	Background jobs, checked every minute while there is work
Instagram token renewal	Daily
Twitch token renewal	Hourly
Legacy cache migration (after upgrading to 3.5.0)	Every 2 minutes until done

Install WP Crontrol to see these jobs and run one by hand; the hooks start with vpf_social_ and vpf_pro_.

Use a real cron

For feeds that update on time:

Step 1. Add to wp-config.php, above “That’s all, stop editing”:

define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true );

Step 2. In your hosting panel, add a cron job every 5 minutes:

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

Without server access, a service such as cron-job.org can call that URL.

Keep loopback requests allowed: WordPress → Tools → Site Health reports “Your site could not complete a loopback request” when they are blocked, and imports will then stay queued.