After launching a WordPress site, monitor whether visitors can reach it and whether its functions still work. Availability is the first check, but performance, backups, security, and content also need attention.
Problems can occur despite regular maintenance and security work. Keep a recovery plan ready so you can restore service when a check detects a failure.
Services such as Scanfully automate uptime checks and notify you when they detect a problem.
1. Uptime Monitoring
Start by checking whether visitors can reach the site.
Real-Time Monitoring
Scanfully checks for outages and intermittent availability errors. A server can remain online while individual requests fail.
Receive notifications by email, Slack, Discord, or a combination of those channels.
Historical Data Analysis
Use the uptime history in your Scanfully dashboard to look for recurring failures and patterns in their timing.
Multi-Faceted Uptime Monitoring
A 200 HTTP response may come from a cached copy of your site. Check that WordPress itself still responds when the cache is bypassed.
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 also plan to add multi-location monitoring, checking access from different parts of the world.
2. Performance Monitoring
For performance monitoring, start with these request timings:
- 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 delays access to the server. See how to improve the DNS Lookup time for your WordPress sites.
TCP Connection
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) provides reliable, ordered data delivery over a network. Monitor TCP Connections to see how long connection setup takes.
If connection setup is slow, see how to improve your TCP Connection.
TLS/SSL Handshake
The TLS/SSL “handshake” is the sequence a client, such as a browser, and server use to establish a secure connection.
Handshake errors or delays can interrupt secure connections. These checks can help you improve the TLS/SSL Handshake process.
Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Time to First Byte (TTFB) is one of the 5 request timings above. It measures the wait for the first data in a response.
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.
Also check loading, interactivity, and visual stability through Google’s Core Web Vitals.
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
Include both of these checks in security monitoring:
- 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 plan to add notifications for these findings.
4. Backup Monitoring
Set up regular automatic backups. Host-level backups can reduce the work inside WordPress, though some sites need more granular controls.
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:
Include backup integrity testing in your monitoring process.
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 is complete and uncorrupted. Regularly confirm that the archive opens and contains all expected files and data.
Restore Testing
Finally, test whether the complete backup can restore the site.
5. Content Health Monitoring
Content Health checks whether published resources still work, including links, media, and embeds.
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.
Our Broken Media Monitoring and Broken Links Monitoring for WordPress features report these failures so you can locate and repair them.
What about SEO?
Yoast SEO and AIOSEO offer content analysis and recommendations. Use monitoring tools alongside them to track the results of your SEO work.
6. Database Monitoring
WordPress stores posts, pages, user information, and site settings in its database. Monitor database performance and growth alongside the rest of the site.
Database Performance
Query Monitor, New Relic, and MySQL Slow Query Log can help identify slow-running database queries.
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
Use Query Monitor and the WordPress Debug Log to collect and analyze SQL errors.
Look out for deadlocks, connection errors, and, if you’re running a multi-server setup, replication errors.
7. Resource Usage
Monitor disk space, CPU, and RAM usage as traffic and stored data grow.
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
An invalid SSL Certificate can prevent visitors from establishing a secure connection, even when the rest of the site works.
Expiry Alerts
Certificate Monitoring is part of Scanfully’s core features. It alerts you when a certificate breaks, recovers, changes, or approaches expiration.
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
Sentry can help collect and analyze error logs so you can investigate reported failures.
404 Errors
Broken Link Checker and Redirection provide tools to find and fix 404 errors in WordPress.
11. User Activity Monitoring
Last on our list of things to monitor for on your WordPress site is user activity monitoring.
On sites with multiple administrators, an activity log helps you investigate who made a recorded change and when.
User activity monitoring records user actions for review. Scanfully includes it in the dashboard 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.
Some activity tracking plugins store log records in the WordPress database. Scanfully keeps that history externally.
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