Options For Reducing Wordpress Heartbeat CPU Use
You can disable it completely by adding the following to your themes function.php file by adding this after the "<?php" tag:
add_action( 'init', 'stop_heartbeat', 1 );
function stop_heartbeat() {
wp_deregister_script('heartbeat');
}
On larger sites where there are usually multiple people working in the admin dashboard this may not be a good option. You can instead reduce the Heartbeat frequency by using the Heartbeat Control plugin.
This plugin will also allow you to disable Heartbeat, but from what I have seen it is not always completely reliable for disabling.
