How can I stop the cron tasks from being triggered by site visitors? My site's logs show that cron is triggered if someone visits the website. This is slowing down the load time for the first visit. 

The cron is configured to run each 3 hours here: Administration » Configuration » System » Cron.

How can I run the cron scheduled and not triggered by visitors?
Drupal 7 incorporated in its modules the code that were in Poormanscron, whose purpose is exactly to run Drupal cron tasks on a site where it is not possible to set cron tasks, when a user visits your site, and every X hours (as set in the page you saw).

If you want to avoid that behavior, you just need to set "Run cron every" to "Never"; contrary to what it could seem, that just influences what happens when users visit your site.[1] You can still run Drupal cron tasks from outside Drupal, remembering that in Drupal 7 cron.php needs to be invoked, from outside Drupal, passing the value shown in "Administration > Reports > Status report."

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[1]: In fact, neither cron.php, nor drupal_cron_run() checks the Drupal variable used in that settings page. The only Drupal variables used are:


"cron_key" that contains the cron key used to avoid the Drupal cron tasks are ran from unauthorized users
"maintenance_mode" that is set to TRUE when the site is in maintenance mode
"cron_last" that contains the timestamp of when cron tasks were ran last time