Security and Health Status – New feature on WordPress 5.2

There are a mount of posts around the Internet saying “Top 10 things” that you need to do on your WordPress website. But this time is different, new WordPress Core released (5.2) gave to us a new important feature.

On your Admin Panel, at “Tools” menu you will find a new page: Site Health Status. Like I wrote on this post, a few years ago Security on WordPress came to stay (read about it on that post). But now, finally we’ve an official guide to check health and security from our WP installation. This new tool basically show recommended improvements at first, but also keeps the other items without issues detected.

I will show you my own example for samuelsilva.pt (where you are right now!).

Critical Issues

Zero critical issues by now. I believe that on another projects I have critical issues diagnosed, but my website is a simple TwentyElevent blog. 🙂

3 Recommended Improvements

1. “Your should remove inactive plugins”

Right, I knew that plugins had really full access to our website core. But what I didn’t know that even inactive plugins keeps access to core (from a hacking perspective of course). So… remove Hello Dolly plugin right now 🙂

2. “You should remove inactive themes”

Well, right. On another website I had this advice: “Have a default theme available”. Makes sense, WordPress automatically will use a default theme available if your actual theme explodes. It’s really a good process to decrease a big problem.

3. One or more recommended (PHP) modules are missing

First time I knew that this handbook exists: Make WordPress Hosting (my bad). There I found a lot of recommendations to host WordPress websites. An updated PHP version isn’t enough to our favourite CMS. Check, for example, PHP extensions:

So what I learned today?

• Remove inactive plugins is important (I will not advise about deprecated plugins…).;
• Hosting a WordPress website isn’t just an updated PHP version;
• The WordPress Hosting Handbook exists 🙂