Monitoring

Optimize WordPress database tables: cleanup, ANALYZE and OPTIMIZE Over the years a WordPress database collects revisions, expired transients, trashed posts and orphaned meta rows, and the large tables (wp_posts, wp_postmeta, wp_options) get fragmented. The MySQL optimizer also works with index statistics that can be outdated after big imports or deletions. Three commands help: ANALYZE TABLE…

Monitor a WordPress site with a shell script and cron An outage that nobody notices for six hours costs more than the outage itself. Before paying for a monitoring service, a small server can watch itself: a shell script checks that the site answers quickly, that the disk is not full and that the PHP…

Tune the PHP-FPM pool for WordPress PHP-FPM runs a pool of PHP worker processes; each worker handles one request at a time. Too few workers, and requests wait in a queue even though the CPU is idle. Too many, and the server runs out of memory and starts swapping, which is worse. The right number…

Enable the MySQL slow query log and analyze WordPress database performance Without logging, slow queries are invisible: the site is slow, but it is not clear which query, from which plugin, is to blame. MySQL’s slow query log records every statement that runs longer than a threshold. It can be enabled on a live server…

Use htop, vmstat, and iostat to identify CPU, RAM, and disk I/O bottlenecks on a WordPress VPS before they cause downtime or slow page loads.

Log 404 URLs using WordPress transients and redirect known broken URLs to the correct pages with 301 redirects.

Use wp_login and wp_logout hooks to record login events to usermeta for security auditing.

Add your own checks to the Site Health screen Tools → Site Health, added in WordPress 5.2, checks the PHP version, HTTPS, scheduled events, the REST API and more, and shows the results as good, recommended or critical. Plugins can add their own tests with the site_status_tests filter. That is the right place to tell…