PHP deprecation warnings after PHP 8.x upgrade — what to fix first

The site was responding normally. Pages rendered, the admin loaded, content updated. The internal scheduler, however, had drifted: 68 of 69 scheduled hooks were overdue, and the most-overdue hook had been delayed by 1,825 days.

The downstream debris was the giveaway. A helper plugin whose entire purpose is to catch "missed scheduled posts" was running 100–200 times per day, 500–700 ms each — roughly two minutes of PHP CPU spent every day papering over a scheduler that no longer ran on time. To anyone reading the homepage, the site was fine. To anyone reading the activity, it had been broken for years.

The operator switched off the internal scheduler in wp-config.php and routed scheduled work through the host's OS-level cron. Cleanup of the orphaned drafts, stale transients, and unprocessed action-queue rows took the next two weeks.