Welcome to the Ultimate Guide on WordPress Site Monitoring. Making sure your WordPress site is running smoothly is the most important thing you can and should do once you’ve launched your WordPress site.
It doesn’t matter how most meticulous efforts to maintain and secure your WordPress site, unforeseen issues can still arise. When they do, it’s crucial to have a robust recovery plan to restore normalcy swiftly and minimize potential financial losses.
There’s no need for you to manually monitor WordPress uptime and downtime. Advanced monitoring services, such as Scanfully, can efficiently handle this for you. That, and much much more.
This comprehensive guide will detail the key aspects of WordPress monitoring and introduce you to the best tools available. While uptime monitoring is vital for any business, there are additional critical elements to monitor to safeguard your website and online reputation.
Let’s delve into this ultimate guide on WordPress monitoring!
1. Uptime Monitoring
First up: uptime monitoring. Arguably the most important one because if your site is not up, there’s not much else to monitor, right?
Real-Time Monitoring
Scanfully monitors for uptime in real-time which means you’ll know your site is down the minute it happens. Not only when the entire site goes down through things like a server being down, though. You’ll want to know if your site intermittently throws related to down-time errors as well.
Through Scanfully’s smart notification systems, you can minimize downtime and keep your visitors happy. You can pick your preferred notification channel from email, Slack, and Discord, or a combination of this.
Historical Data Analysis
Now, getting notifications when your WordPress site goes down is wonderful, but you’ll want to be able to investigate for patterns as well, right? Understanding downtime trends can help prevent future outages. Your Scanfully dashboard provides historical data on your site’s uptime, helping you identify patterns and address recurring issues.
Multi-Faceted Uptime Monitoring
Most other uptime monitoring just look at whether your site returns a 200 HTTP code and call it a day. But you miss a whole array of issues if that’s just what you’re looking for. For instance, if your site is cached, pinging it will effectively ping the cached version of your site. It’s very well possible that your site is down, but cache is alive. And you’ll want to know that, right?
Scanfully offers multi-faceted uptime monitoring where we don’t just monitor the HTTP code of your site, but we also look a couple of layers deeper.
We’re not going to stop there, though. We’ll be offer multi-location monitoring as well. Simulating user access from around the globe to ensure consistent uptime everywhere.
2. Performance Monitoring
The second most important thing to add to your WordPress Monitoring tool stack is WordPress Performance Monitoring. There are various components that go into this, but let’s start with the obvious ones:
- DNS Lookup
- TCP Connection
- TLS/SSL Handshake
- Time to First Byte (TTFB)
- Download Content
Additionally, you’ll want to monitor for Core Web Vitals as well, of course, but just like Uptime Monitoring for WordPress comes first, so do these 5 elements.
DNS Lookup
DNS stands for Domain Name System. It’s the internet’s version of an address book. Every time you type in a website’s domain name, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) performs a DNS lookup to find the website’s IP address. The time taken by this process is the DNS lookup time.
A slow DNS lookup can significantly hamper your website’s speed, directly impacting user experience and SEO rankings. Learn how to improve the DNS Lookup time for your WordPress sites.
TCP Connection
The Transmission Control Protocol, TCP for short, connections play a crucial role on the internet. TCP Connections ensure a reliable and ordered delivery of data over a network. Let’s delve into its working and importance.
There are a few ways on how to improve your TCP Connection you should look at if it is performing poor.
TLS/SSL Handshake
If you’ve never heard of the TLS/SSL handshake before, let’s explain. This “handshake” is a series of steps that a client (think browser, for example) and server take to establish a secure connection. It’s the internet’s way of ensuring that your data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Monitoring for the TLS/SSL handshake is a crucial part of our WordPress Monitoring as hiccups in that proces will chain and cause serious site health issues. Here are ways you can improve the TLS/SSL Handshake process for your WordPress sites.
Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Of this list of 5 items, the Time to First Byte (TTFB) is most likely the most known metric. It’s a metric WordPress hosting companies like to share in their marketing just like Google like to make sure you understand to improve this metric. And these two examples are most likely related 😉.
You’ll want to have the shortest possible TTFB at all time, for your cached pages, but for your uncached pages even more. Why? Well, you shouldn’t rely on caching to make a WordPress site fast because Cache hit ratio is a thing, and no site sees a cache hit ratio of 100.
Scanfully monitors your TTFB in real-time, and provides historical data to allow you to do analysis properly. Anything above 500ms should be considered bad. If you find your site performing around that, or even higher, it’s time to look into how to improve your TTFB.
Download Content
Download Content essentially is the duration it takes for the content of a webpage to be downloaded from the server and displayed on your browser.
This metric is crucial for a stellar user experience and is a part of the larger Core Web Vitals initiative by Google, which focuses on loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
Think of it like this, if a page on your site loads 7 images that are 5MB per image, you’ll want to know! Because 35MB + the rest of the site is ridiculously much. Which is why Scanfully scans for the size of your Download Content. We even wrote documentation on how to improve the size of your Download Content.
Additionally, you’ll want to monitor for Core Web Vitals as well. You can do this manually in the browser, or wait when we’ve fully integrated this in Scanfully 🙂.
3. Security Monitoring
There are many different components that go into having a fully secure site, but the two most important things that should be part of your WordPress Monitoring are
- malware scanning
- scanning for outdated plugins, themes, or WordPress itself
Malware Scanning
Malware scanning inside of WordPress of WordPress is, as Calvin Alkan from Snicco expertly demonstrates, is inherently flawed and cannot be trusted. So that leaves the task for malware scanning inside of WordPress up to services like We Watch Your Website.
Scanning for (Security) Updates
One of the biggest reasons your WordPress site can have malware is caused by outdated and insecure plugins, themes, and WordPress Core. Our Scanfully Site Health overview highlights outdated software for exactly this reason.
Some hosting companies periodically scan for security updates, but you can use a solution like Patchstack or Solid Security as well.
You’ll want to act as fast as possible when you have a vulnerable or compromised plugin installed on your WordPress site, though.
We’ll soon add notifications to it as well, but this is one thing you don’t want to be missing in your WordPress Monitoring list of things to monitor.
4. Backup Monitoring
Imagine losing all your precious data – it’s every site owner’s nightmare! Regular, automatic backups ensure that you can restore your site quickly in case anything goes awry. Ideally, this is done at the level of your hosting company for resource conservation reasons. But depending on your needs, you may need a solution with a bit more granular control.
There are options in plugins like BlogVault, Solid Backups, or BackWPup that automate this process to an off-server location, but be mindful of the overhead it’s adding.
Backup Monitoring Steps:
There is one thing that need to be part of your backup monitoring process more than anything. And that’s backup integrity testing.
To do that in the best way possible, your backup monitoring strategy should have following steps in place:
Off Server
First off, you should want to be able to access your WordPress site’s backup zip file independently from your hosting’s storage. We need to plan for worst-case scenarios here, and that means we need to assume it’s possible for a backup to not be available via your hosting company.
Some hosting companies offer this option, but often times you’ll be depending on a backup plugin in WordPress to take care of this.
Backup Integrity
A backup is only useful if it’s complete and uncorrupted. You won’t be the first one that has the need to unzip a backup zip file but finds themselves not being able to open the backup file. This means you’ll need to regularly check if the backup files can be openened and if everything that’s supposed to be in there actually is there.
Restore Testing
Having a backup of your WordPress site that you can open and that is complete is the goal. Hower, there is one final step left to add to your Backup Monitoring strategy, and that’s to actually test if restoring your backup is possible.
You won’t be the first to discover that a backup for whatever reason can not be properly used to restore the full site. So, test those backups for restore as well!
5. Content Health Monitoring
Content Health is about the health of the published content in your WordPress site. There are a couple of bad things that can happen inside your content that can sabotage your SEO and the visitors’s user experience.
These are the things you should be regularly monitoring for as part of your content health monitoring strategy:
- Broken links. Every single link that exists on your site should link directly to a working URL. Especially internally, but links to external sites need to point to functioning URLs as well. You should want to avoid clicking on a link and seeing a 301, 302, 404, and 410 HTTP status code.
- Broken media. Every single time your content references an image, PDF, or video, that media should actually be there and showing.
- Broken embeds. For your content to deliver the best user experience for your visitors, you need to make sure your YouTube videos, X (formerly Twitter), Vimeo, or any of the other embeds made possible inside of WordPress, are still working as intended.
Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog help you find and fix these issues, ensuring a smooth browsing experience for your visitors.
What about SEO?
Content is king, but only truly if it’s SEO optimized. Where plugins like Yoast SEO and AIOSEO offer in-depth content analysis and recommendations, the don’t offer SEO monitoring. You need the same tools as mentioned above to allow to you monitor your SEO efforts.
6. Database Monitoring
In the world of WordPress, your database is the beating heart of your website. It stores everything from your posts and pages to user information and site settings. Proper monitoring of this crucial component is essential for maintaining a healthy, and performant WordPress site.
Let’s dive into the key aspects of database monitoring and how you can implement them effectively.
Database Performance
Just as a doctor checks your pulse to gauge your overall health, monitoring performance metrics gives you insight into your database’s well-being. Tools like Query Monitor, New Relic, and MySQL Slow Query Log are invaluable for identifying and optimizing slow-running queries.
These tools help you pinpoint bottlenecks in your database operations, allowing you to address issues before they impact user experience.
Size and Growth
Your database requires ongoing maintenance to prevent it from becoming bloated. Utilities such as WP-Optimize, Advanced Database Cleaner, and phpMyAdmin offer insights into your database’s size and growth patterns.
Now, it’s important to realize that pruning your database isn’t necessary for performance reasons so much as it is for cleanliness. Often times cleaning up revisions is mentioned in this context, for instance. Your database should just be able to handle any amount of posts you add to the wp_posts table. That said, it makes no sense to store data that you won’t need.
Pay particular attention to rapidly growing tables, as these may indicate areas needing optimization. Also, monitor index sizes to ensure they’re not becoming bloated, which can negatively impact performance. If you’re using replication, keep track of binary log growth to prevent unexpected storage issues.
Error Logs
Error logs serve as a health report for your database, highlighting potential issues before they escalate. Query Monitor and the WordPress Debug Log are excellent tools for catching and analyzing SQL errors.
Look out for deadlocks, connection errors, and, if you’re running a multi-server setup, replication errors.
7. Resource Usage
Your WordPress site is going to use all different kinds of resources. The most important ones to monitor are disk space, CPU and RAM usage. The combination of these determine how healthy your site while traffic is hitting it and the site is growing.
Disk Space
Running out of disk space can bring your site to a grinding halt. Weird errors and a site that simply can’t process visitors. Unfortunately, there’s not really a service out there that can monitor disk space for you. But, visit your site’s Scanfully Site Health dashboard regularly, and you’ll quickly be in the know of how much the disk space has grown.
CPU and RAM Usage
Your server’s CPU and RAM are precious resources. Some hosting companies offer some sort of tooling like New Relic to provide insights into server resource usage. There is, however, no tool out there that sends signals when your site hits a certain threshold. This is something you’ll have to monitor your site for manually.
8. Core Web Vitals Monitoring
Nobody likes a slow website. Core Web Vitals is a tool inside your Chromium-based browser that offers a detailed analyses plus recommendations on how to improve the results.
In the Core Web Vitals report, you’ll find, based on LCP, INP, and CLS, all kinds of insights.
You can perform these tests regularly yourself in the browser, but there’s also a plugin for WordPress that does this for you called Speedguard.
Core Web Vitals monitoring will be added to a future version of Scanfully as part of our Performance Monitoring.
9. SSL Certificate Monitoring
You can have an absolute perfect site, zero issues anywhere, but if your SSL Certificate is not valid, nobody can and will visit your site. An absolute disaster.
Expiry Alerts
An expired SSL certificate can erode user trust and kill any traffic coming to your site. We think Certificate Monitoring is so important that we’ve made it part of Scanfully’s core features. We’re scanning and alerting you the moment a certificate is broken (and fixed) or changed or about to. You’ll want to know about all four instances.
Certificate Integrity
Additionally, we’re monitoring for the integrity of the SSL certificate like the certificate details, its chain, and whether it has a valid protocol and cipher. All key things any proper certificate should have.
10. Error Monitoring
An often overlooked type of monitoring in WordPress is error monitoring. Your site may be running bad code that is causing harm like slow queries, notices, and any other kind of general error.
These errors are generally hidden, but the information in them should be seen as something you want to fix immediately. The smoother your site runs, the less problems your visitors are running into.
Error Logs
Error logs are a treasure trove of information. A solution like Sentry can help collect and analyze these logs, detecting and fixing critical issues before they affect your users.
404 Errors
Dead links can frustrate users and harm your SEO. Broken Link Checker and Redirection provide tools to find and fix 404 errors in your WordPress site. Fixing these erros will make sure your WordPress site will stay as user-friendly as you’ve built it.
11. User Activity Monitoring
Last on our list of things to monitor for on your WordPress site is user activity monitoring.
For instance, are you managing a website with multiple users handling various admin tasks? Are you struggling to keep track of what users are doing on the admin side of your site? Do you want to enhance your site’s security by monitoring and logging all user activities? Of course you do!
User activity monitoring allows you to easily monitor and track all user activities on your website, ensuring you stay informed and your site remains secure. And that’s why we’ve built it in your Scanfully dashboard as part of your Timeline.
We’ve purposely chosen to not have this be part of WordPress’ database. And as such, we’re pulling in all the events as they’re happening. So if your WordPress site goes down for whatever reason, you’ll still be able to check Scanfully what’s up.
Additionally, lost of different web hosts can’t handle the amount of data the user activity tracking plugins add to your database. With Scanfully, that’s is not longer a concern.
By integrating these components and utilizing the suggested tools into your WordPress monitoring strategy, you’ll create a holistic approach to maintaining your site’s health, security, and performance.
This comprehensive coverage ensures you can promptly address any issues and provide a smooth, enjoyable experience for your visitors. Happy monitoring!
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