WordPress site monitoring - The Basics + Tools you need

WordPress site monitoring is essential to healthy and sustainable growth. It enables us to understand what needs attention and which efforts are yielding positive results. It creates a feedback loop that provides the data and information we need to maintain and grow our websites.

Monitoring WordPress websites is easy with the right tools. Knowing what to monitor, however, is key. The right metrics and data points enable you to avoid analysis paralysis and take action immediately. So which tools provide the best insight, and what should be monitored? Continue reading to find out.

What to monitor

The truth is that there are a million different things that you can monitor. Should you monitor all of them? Well, probably not, which is why starting with the basics is a good idea. Covering the basics means you can ensure consistent uptime and a healthy and secure website.

With that being said, let’s look at what every website owner should be monitoring:

Performance and user experience

Having a responsive and snappy website goes a long way in providing users and visitors with an engaging experience. This helps in:

• User retention: Users, visitors, and customers are more likely to engage positively with your website
• SEO: Search engines prefer fast-loading, responsive websites
• Conversion rates: Visitors and customers are more likely to abandon the sales funnel if pages take too long to load

Website performance depends on a number of factors, each of which contributes to the overall speed of the site. To this end, we can use metrics such as FCP (First Contentful Paint), which tells us how long it takes for the first content to appear, and SI (Speed Index) which tells us how quickly visitors can see content on our site.

Updates

WordPress, plugin, and theme updates are critical to WordPress security. Updates often address security and performance issues that might be present in earlier versions. They also add new functionality, which is another reason why you should be consistently on top of all updates.

While some may choose to test updates in a staging environment before rolling them out to the live website, an exception is often made for updates that address known vulnerabilities. Whenever a known vulnerability is present on our website, immediate action should be taken to address the security risk. If an update is available, it is a good idea to install it or at least expedite the testing process.

Uptime

Uptime tells us whether our website is online and accessible to visitors and shows any outages. If our website keeps going down, this can harm our reputation, SEO, visitors, and sales. After all, nobody can interact with a website that simply isn’t available.

User and system activities

WordPress users are responsible for a flurry of activity at any given time. From publishing and unpublishing posts, editing, creating, deleting, and modifying user accounts, to a million other things, users breathe life into your WordPress websites. However, all these changes can lead to issues, which, if not tracked, can be difficult to diagnose and prevent.

This is why user and system activity monitoring is so important. Keeping a record of who did what and when helps us improve security, user accountability, troubleshooting, compliance, and workflows.

SEO

SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, plays an outsized role in a website’s success. It helps you boost your online presence and attract more visitors and customers. Monitoring your site’s SEO performance ensures that you remain competitive and grow your WordPress site.

There are several metrics that you can monitor when it comes to SEO. Which ones you decide to follow will depend on your SEO strategy and goals. Keyword performance, visits, backlinks, bounce rate, and search visibility are some of the more popular metrics website owners and marketers use for measuring their SEO success.

Monitoring performance, website health, and safety with Modular DS

Modular DS offers a slew of monitoring tools that cover a hefty chunk of your monitoring needs. It also offers administrative tools such as remote backups and remote updates, making WordPress management that much easier.

Modular DS comes in two parts – a plugin that needs to be installed on your WordPress website and an online hub that acts like the control center. It’s important to note that the plugin has no interface. It acts as a connector to the online dashboard from which everything is managed.

Uptime monitoring

The Modular DS uptime monitor tells us how long the website has been running for, (since the installation of Modular DS) as well as uptime and downtime percentages.

The chart also tells us the response time. The higher the graph goes, the slower the response time is. If we see that the website is experiencing extended slow response times, it’s time to take action.

Health and Safety

The health and safety menu option gives us a clear and well-rounded picture of the state of our WordPress website. There is a lot to unpack here, so we’ll go through each section one at a time.

Critical errors

Under Critical errors we can find performance and security-related issues that need to be addressed as soon as possible. Each listed error includes a tag to let you know whether it’s related to performance or security. Furthermore, by clicking the arrow, you can get further details and context, enabling you to prioritize which error to handle first.

Site status

Like critical errors, Site status presents us with security and performance-related issues, extending what is provided in Critical errors. Each entry is accompanied by a colored icon, indicating whether it is critical, requires attention, or is all ok.

Site information

Under site information, you’ll find information about your WordPress site, including database information, versions, directories, and much more.

Vulnerabilities

Under Vulnerabilities, you’ll find information about any known vulnerabilities in WordPress, plugins, themes, and PHP, if any are available. Modular DS will also let you know which versions are affected and in which versions the vulnerabilities have been patched. This is vital information when it comes to updates.

WP Activity log for monitoring user and system activity

WP Activity Log by Melapress is a WordPress activity log plugin that offers broad logging capabilities. Recorded events include important details such as the date and time, user and their role, IP address, and additional information about the change.

WP Activity Log can be installed like any other plugin. You can choose between free and premium editions with the latter including additional features such as:

• Advanced search filters
• User session management
• Email and SMS notifications
• And much more…

Once the plugin has been installed, head to WP Activity Log > Log Viewer.

Here you’ll find all recorded user and system activities. Each entry includes the following information:

• ID: This is the unique identifier for the activity event that was logged.
• Severity: Indicates the potential severity of the event
• Date: The date and time the event occurred
• User: The user who actioned the event
• IP: The IP address of the user who actioned the event
• Event type: The category of event logged
• Message: Additional information about the event

Events are logged in chronological order. However, clicking any of the headers reorganizes the log by that attribute.

While the free version has free-text based search, the premium edition includes an extensive list of filters to help you narrow your search should you be on the lookout for a specific type of event – for example, all events of a particular user.

Benefits of user and system activity monitoring

User and system activity monitoring enables you to improve several distinct areas of your website. Understanding what these benefits are ensures you make the most of your new plugin.

Security

Websites are often targeted by malicious actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities for their benefit. If you’re running an eCommerce website, monitoring can also help you uncover fraud attempts, which can cost your business a lot of money if successful. Through user activity monitoring, you can spot suspicious behavior early on, often before it becomes a fully blown-out crisis. This includes:

• Logins, logouts, and failed login attempts
• Changes to users, settings, and posts
• Changes related to 3rd party plugins such as WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, WPForms, and many others
• Fraudulent transactions

Troubleshooting

Whenever something breaks down, the events that precede it typically play a role in the outage. Without a log, finding which events took place in the lead up to the outage is practically impossible. With a log in place, all you have to do is look it up. This can drastically reduce troubleshooting time, ensuring you’re up and running quicker than ever before.

Compliance

Activity logging and legislation and standards such as GDPR and PCI DSS go hand in hand. For example, GDPR states that website owners should keep a log of everything that happens on their website. On the other hand, requirement 10 of PCI DSS states that you should track and monitor all access.

While compliance goes deeper than activity logging, it is a requirement that needs to be met nevertheless.

Core Web Vitals for monitoring user experience

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics defined by Google that attempt to measure user experience in real terms. These metrics mainly focus on speed and visuals, which also influence search rankings. Core Web Vitals can be tracked directly in Modular DS, but you can also get this data using Google PageSpeed Insights or Google Search Console.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LCP measures how long it takes for the largest visible element on a page to load fully. A slow LCP degrades the user experience, which can lead to frustration among visitors and users. It can also lead to higher abandonment rates.

An LCP score of under 2.5 seconds is considered desirable. If your LCP takes longer, consider optimizing images, enabling caching, and using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help improve loading speeds.

First Input Delay (FID)

FID measures how quickly a website responds to user interactions. These interactions include clicking a button or tapping a link. A slow response can create a lousy user experience, more so on mobile devices.

Google recommends an FID of less than 100 milliseconds. If your site is slower, check which plugins are running scripts and whether they’re essential or not. Make sure both plugins and themes are fully updated and speak to the developer if scripts continue to slow down your FID.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

CLS is a metric that measures the visual stability of a webpage. If certain elements move unexpectedly, like ike a button changing position while a user or visitor is about to tap it, it degrades the user experience.

A good CLS score is anything below 0.1. Unless you have custom themes or plugins, make sure everything is updated and, as always, speak to the developer if the issue is not resolved.

Ahrefs for monitoring SEO

Ahrefs is a cloud-based SEO tool for monitoring and optimizing your website’s performance in search engines. It comes with a number of tools and features that can help you monitor your SEO efforts.

Site Audit

Site Audit is a very useful feature that scans your website for on-page and technical SEO issues. It highlights technical problems such as:

• Broken links
• Missing meta descriptions
• Slow-loading page
• Security vulnerabilities.

Each issue is categorized according to its severity. This makes it easier to prioritize fixes that will have the biggest impact on your SEO.

Site Audit also provides recommendations on how to resolve each issue, making it easier for both beginners and experienced users to optimize their sites.

Monitoring backlinks

Backlinks, that is to say, links to your site, are an important factor in how search engines determine rankings. Using Ahref’s backlink monitoring tool, you can keep track of backlinks, including current and past links.

Monitoring backlinks is important for a couple of reasons. Links from high-ranking, authoritative sites can help drive traffic to your site and improve your search performance. On the other hand, harmful links can tarnish your reputation and hinder you from achieving your SEO goals. Through monitoring, you can refine your SEO strategy to ensure your link-building efforts are yielding the results you expect.

Competition analysis

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is considered a timeless treatise on strategy. One of the points in the book is to “Know thy enemy.” Knowing whom you’re up against gives you a real advantage, as this enables you to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Through Ahref’s competitor analysis, you can see which keywords your competitors are ranking for, their top-performing pages, as well as their backlink sources. Using this information, you can identify content gaps and discover new opportunities to take your SEO to the next level.

Keyword tracking

The Rank Tracker enables you to monitor your search results positions for specific keywords. The tool allows you to track ranking progress for as many as 10,000 keywords, compare them against competitors, and receive updates on changes.

This tool is particularly useful for monitoring the effectiveness of your current SEO efforts. Using the data the tool provides, you can make more informed decisions to improve your content strategy.

WordPress site monitoring – an investment well worth making

WordPress site monitoring offers many benefits. As we saw in the article, getting started with the basics is easy – it requires minimal time and financial investment; yet the benefits are worth a king’s ransom.

From protecting your site against intruders to ensuring constant uptime, monitoring is the gift that keeps on giving – helping you grow your website to new heights.