Site Health Tool
Video Transcript
In this class, we’re going to go over a built-in tool that helps us keep an eye on security and performance issues on our WordPress site, the site health tool.
Now we briefly touched on the site health tool in a previous class, whenever we were talking about updating our site’s PHP version of a site health tool has been a built in feature since version 5.1. of WordPress. And at that time, he was pretty clunky to say the least. Since then, though, there have been several improvements, and has become a very helpful tool. Now there are no settings to mess with, nor updates you need to worry about. And it’s not a replacement for other tools we’ve covered in this course. But it will ino if you have an older version of PHP, as we demonstrated in that earlier class, or some inactive plugins or themes that you may want to delete, as well as a bunch of other checks here, let’s have a look.
Now you can access the site health tool a couple of ways. And by the way, you may have it displayed right here on your dashboard. And if you don’t, but you want to come on up here to the screen options, click that drop down and make sure this box here is ticked next to site health status. Now as far as accessing your site health tool, couple of ways you can do that, click on the link in the site health status module or in tools in your left admin sidebar, click on site health either way, you’ll end up at the same spot right here. And as soon as you access this page, that circle up there starts off blue, gray, and then hopefully green. Otherwise, if your site health is not good, and the color will reflect that via yellow or red. And below under status, we’ll give a list of the items you should pay attention to. And of those items, if you have any is because you might just have the gold checkmark here. Yay.
That means that everything is working perfectly. Otherwise, any of those displayed modules like these two here, saying that I’ve got inactive plugins and themes that I should get rid of, or activate them and use them. It tells you what those items reference, be it a security issue, or a performance issue. And if you have the drop down arrow, this gives you more information about that particular type of issue. And in a lot of cases, there’s links in here that you can click on to learn more about that particular issue. Now if we take a look at some of the past test, and I’ll give you an idea as to what all your site health tool test for. And you can see they’re broken down into performance and security. And don’t forget to hit the drop down if you learn more about these.
Now you have two options up here, status is one that we’re going to pay attention to more times than not. But info does provide some additional information regarding your site. A little bit of a blurb here to tell you more about that. And just in case like it says here, you ever request from your hosting services support staff to get a copy of your site’s info, this is probably what they’re talking about. Go to your site health tool, click on info, click on copy Site Info to clipboard, paste that in a text document, zip it up, send it on more times and not though, what I’ve encountered is that if I have a site issue, and I’m contacting my hosting services support staff, they’re gonna want me to create an admin level user for them to get into the admin area.
So they can poke around on here and see for themselves what’s up. But just in case you need to send this information now you know how to get it. Well, that’s going to bring us to the end of this class on a look at our site health tool and what it does for our WordPress site. Thanks for checking it out and you have a great day.