Delays

Delays are a Pro feature.

An action can wait before it runs. Open the action's menu, choose Add a delay, and set an amount in minutes, hours or days.

Add the tag, then email them three days later is one automation, not two.

How the waiting works

A delayed action is handed to Action Scheduler, the same queue WooCommerce uses for its own background work. When the time comes, the automation resumes from exactly the action that was waiting — the ones before it have already run, and the ones after it have not.

It is a floor, not a moment

Action Scheduler runs about once a minute, driven by WP-Cron. So a one-hour delay means not before one hour, not exactly at one hour. On a quiet site with no real cron, it can be considerably later, because WP-Cron only runs when somebody visits.

If delays matter to you, set up a real server cron and define DISABLE_WP_CRON — Zapify → Settings → System status says whether this is worth doing on your site.

Because of that, the shortest delay Zapify offers is one minute. Anything shorter would be a promise the queue cannot keep.

Removing a delay

Open the delay and choose Remove delay. The action goes back to running as soon as it can, and nothing else about it changes.

What a delay is not

A delay does not re-check the automation's conditions when it wakes up. The decision to run was made when the trigger fired; the delay only postpones the doing. If you need the condition checked at the later moment, put it on the delayed action itself.