Tools: Site Health

WordPress offers a diagnosis of your site’s health. Learn how to use the Site Health tool to help you monitor how your site is doing. Keeping an eye on your site’s health status is crucial to ensure that it performs at its best.

Learning outcomes

1. Navigating the Site Health page.
2. Distinguishing between critical and performance issues.
3. Removing inactive themes and plugins.
4. Updating WordPress and the version of PHP your site is using.
5. Installing option PHP modules.

Comprehension questions

1. Why do you need to back up your site before making updates?
2. What are the two main issues you will find on the status tab of the Site Health page?
3. What is the difference between the status tab and the info tab?

Resources

• Site Health Screen
• Health Check & Troubleshooting Plugin

Transcript

Good day and welcome to Learn WordPress. Did you know that WordPress offers a diagnosis of your site’s health? In this session, we are going to explore how to ensure you keep your site in tip-top shape. The Site Health widget can be found on the dashboard. Or you can make your way to Tools and click on Site Health. And as you will notice at the top, my Site Health needs to be improved.

There are two tabs on the Site Health page: status and info. The status tab allows you to see critical information about your WordPress configuration, along with anything else that requires your attention. The info tab is a granular view of the technical aspects of your WordPress website. You can see detailed information about every aspect of your site, such as themes, plugins, and your server setup for example. There is also a helpful export feature that allows you to copy all the information about your site to the clipboard.

When we go back to the Status tab, you will notice the two main categories are security or performance-related issues. Critical issues refer to parts of your website that can be potential security vulnerabilities or serious performance issues. The critical issue coming up for me at the moment is that my site is running an outdated version of PHP. As the PHP version is set at the server level by your hosting company, updating involves either going to your host’s dashboard and changing the settings there or, if that’s not an option, asking them to do it. Please remember to back up your site before updating WordPress or the PHP version you use.

Other types of critical issues you may encounter are one or more required modules are missing, you have plugins waiting to be updated, your site could not complete a loopback request etc. When you open the accordion, you will learn more about which steps to take to solve a specific problem.

Next, we can talk about recommended improvements. This section lists all the items that are not critical for your website but should be modified for better security and performance. In my case, I should first update the version of WordPress that I’m using and then remove any inactive plugins and themes.

To update WordPress, you can click on Please update now at the top of the page, and this will take you to Updates. And now, you can merely click on update to the new version and remember to back up your database and files. To remove an inactive theme, make your way to Appearance, open up the inactive theme and click on Delete bottom right.

Now we will move on to inactive plugins. Make your way to Plugins, and this time, we can use the Bulk select option by selecting all the inactive plugins and deleting them simultaneously.

Let’s make our way back to the Site Health page, as there’s one more recommended improvement that we need to discuss. The last recommended improvement suggests that I install two optional PHP modules that have not been installed. You could install these in cPanel, Plesk or similar software if your web host provides that access. But if your hosting company has not provided you with a way to install these, you can contact your host and ask them to do it for you.

Lastly, the tests that have been passed are all the other items tested by the Site Health tool and show no issues. You can learn more about this tool through the Site Health Support page. Remember, Leigh Hunt said; “The groundwork for all happiness is good health.” Visit Learn WordPress for more tutorials and training material.