The latest update to WordPress is all about helping users troubleshoot problems that may occur with your website and urging them to keep the site as secure as possible.
The Site Health Check feature set offers a great deal of troubleshooting tools should you experience general wonkiness on your site at any time.
The newest feature set, aptly named ‘Site Health’, is immediately available in your WordPress dashboard under the Tools menu once you update to v5.2. The make.wordpress.org blog has a good post with all the details on Site Health Check.
During our SIG, we found that the options available with Site Health Check were enhanced a bit more once the free Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin is installed and activated. This plugin adds a new Troubleshooting tab and Tools tab on the Site Health information page.
We briefly discussed ways that you might turn off some of the tests that Site Health performs. This might be used in the case where your host delays certain updates for a period of time after they are released. Turning off a related test would reduce the negative effect this failed test would have on your Site Health score.
A plugin to assist with this is Site Health Tool Manager. As of this writing its still at v1.x, so buyer beware. Use with caution. WP Tavern offered a good discussion on why you might want to use, or not, this capability in a blog post by Jeff Chandler. Check it out.
Security Plugins anyone?
With the little time remaining, we discussed several good security plugins for your WordPress website. Specifically we highlighted:
All of these are excellent choices. Depending on the type of edge security your web host provides with your WordPress hosting, one or another of these may be of more use. I have used each of them and they all offer benefits. Each of these plugins also has a premium version offering additional capability. Be sure to check with your host before going to the premium version. You want to make sure you’re not already getting that protection with your hosting plan.
That’s about it. If you have any questions or comments, post ’em below. Let’s talk about it.
