Description
You already have plugins that each watch one thing. Guru Site Health is the layer above them: it reads what is actually happening on your site, works out how healthy it really is, and answers three questions on one screen.
What is important? What changed? What next?
It does not replace your SEO plugin, your security plugin, or your cache plugin. It reads alongside them and turns a pile of separate signals into one score you can act on.
Features
The score
- Six areas weighted into a single number you can track over time.
- Anything that cannot be measured is excluded from the average, never counted as zero.
- Severity adapts to your environment — debug mode is a serious problem on a live site and completely normal on a laptop.
Finding and fixing
- Every issue says what is wrong, why it matters, and exactly what to do about it.
- The evidence behind each finding is shown, so you can check it rather than take it on faith.
- Issues grouped by severity and filterable by area, so you can start with what actually matters.
- Reads Rank Math or Yoast SEO where they are installed, clearly labelled.
Seeing what changed
- Score history over the last 7, 30, 90 or 365 days, or any custom date range.
- Compare two periods to see precisely which issues appeared and which were resolved.
- Email alerts only when something genuinely regresses. No daily digest.
- Scans on a schedule: hourly, twice daily, daily or weekly.
Reporting
- A printable report with a plain-English summary, charts, and every fix.
- Save it as a PDF from your browser — no PDF library is bundled to do it.
- Comparisons export the same way, which is the document to send a client.
Built for real sites
- Scan history lives in its own database table, never in autoloaded options — we do not cause the bloat we scan for.
- Large sites can spread a scan across several requests so it never times out.
- Keeps the last 100 detailed scans by default, adjustable from 10 to 2000.
- A short guided introduction on first run, re-openable whenever you like.
- A REST API under
bwg-site-health/v1exposes every scan, so the data is yours. - No external requests of any kind.
- Fully translatable.
What it checks
Every check below runs on your own site, with no account and no setup. A full audit takes a few seconds and reads only — nothing is changed.
- Updates — outdated core, plugins and themes, PHP versions past their security-support date, and whether anything is blocking automatic updates from landing.
- Security & configuration — weak or default authentication keys, the file editor, debug output in production, plain HTTP, open registration handing out privileged roles, XML-RPC, predictable admin usernames.
- Database — autoloaded option bloat, revision build-up, expired transients, orphaned metadata: the routine maintenance nobody remembers to do.
- Media — images missing from disk after a bad migration, oversized unoptimised originals, missing alt text.
- Accessibility — images with no alt attribute, links a screen reader announces as nothing, skipped heading levels.
- SEO — search-engine visibility, a robots.txt blocking your whole site, plain permalinks, missing sitemap.
It respects what you already run
If you use Rank Math or Yoast SEO, Guru Site Health reads their analysis and folds it into your score, clearly labelled so you always know where a finding came from. If you use neither, nothing is missing — the SEO checks above still run.
The same rule applies everywhere: Guru Site Health never asks you to install another plugin to work, and never counts a missing plugin against your score.
Honest scoring
Two rules make the number trustworthy:
- What cannot be measured is never scored as zero. If a check has no data source, it is reported as not measured and excluded from the average entirely. Not having a particular plugin installed can never lower your score.
- Severity depends on context. Debug mode is a serious problem on a live site and completely normal on a developer’s machine. Guru Site Health reads your environment type and scores accordingly, instead of nagging every local install.
Automatic monitoring
Guru Site Health scans on a schedule and keeps a history, so you can see your score over time and exactly which issues appeared or were resolved between any two scans.
It emails you only when something genuinely regresses — a new high-severity problem, or a real drop in score. There is no daily digest, because a daily “still fine” email is a daily email you will learn to ignore.
Reports you can hand to someone else
Your latest scan opens as a printable report: a plain-English summary of what the score means, charts showing where the problems are, and every finding with its fix and the evidence behind it. Save it as a PDF straight from your browser.
No PDF library is bundled to do it. Your browser already renders type better than any PHP library would, and the result is selectable text rather than a picture of text.
You can also compare any two periods — the last 7, 30, 90 or 365 days, or a custom date range — and export that comparison the same way. If you look after sites for other people, that is the document that shows what actually changed this month.
Privacy: nothing leaves your site
Guru Site Health makes no external requests at all. No accounts, no API keys, no telemetry, no analytics, no “anonymous usage data”. Every scan runs on your server and every result is stored in your own database.
The only email it ever sends goes to the address you choose, through your own site’s mail configuration.
Screenshots
Installation
Install from your dashboard (easiest)
- In WordPress, go to Plugins Add New.
- Search for BuildWithGuru Site Health.
- Click Install Now, then Activate.
Install from a downloaded file
- Download the .zip file from this page.
- Go to Plugins Add New Upload Plugin.
- Choose the .zip, click Install Now, then Activate.
Your first scan
- Look for Guru Site Health in the left-hand admin menu. It sits below Settings, near the bottom.
- Click Run scan. On most sites this takes a few seconds.
- You will see a score out of 100, the six areas that produced it, and a list of issues with the worst first.
A short guided tour opens the first time you visit. You can reopen it at any point with the Guide button in the top right.
What to do next
Work down the issue list from the top. Click any issue to expand it: you get what is wrong, why it matters, the steps to fix it, and the evidence the finding is based on.
Fix one thing, run another scan, and watch the score move. That is the whole loop.
There is nothing to set up first. Automatic daily scanning is on from the moment you activate, and you can change the schedule, add an email address for alerts, or switch it off entirely in Settings.
Requirements
- WordPress 6.4 or newer
- PHP 8.1 or newer
On an older PHP version the plugin shows a notice and deactivates itself rather than breaking your site.
Where your data is kept
In your own database, on your own server. Nothing is sent anywhere, so there is no account to create and no key to paste. Deleting the plugin removes its two tables and every option it created, leaving nothing behind.
FAQ
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How is this different from WordPress’s built-in Site Health?
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Core’s Site Health screen runs a list of pass/fail tests and leaves you to decide which of them matter. This runs a weighted audit across six areas and reduces it to one number, then keeps a history of that number — so you can see whether the maintenance you did last month actually improved anything. Core’s health check tells you what is true right now; this tells you what changed, and what to do next.
It also reads Rank Math or Yoast where they are installed, which core does not.
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Does this replace my security or SEO plugin?
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No, and it is not trying to. Guru Site Health does not scan for malware and does not check keyword rankings — those need constantly-updated threat databases and search-engine crawling, which dedicated plugins are funded to do properly. Guru Site Health measures the things nobody else covers and normalises everything into one score.
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Do I need Rank Math or Yoast?
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No. Guru Site Health’s SEO checks run on every site. If one of those plugins is installed, Guru Site Health additionally reads its per-post analysis to give you more detail — clearly labelled with where it came from.
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Does it send my data anywhere?
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No. Guru Site Health makes no external HTTP requests whatsoever. Nothing about your site leaves your server.
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Will it change anything on my site?
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No. Every check only reads. Guru Site Health tells you what to fix and how, and never modifies, deletes or “optimises” anything on your behalf. The only rows it ever writes or removes are its own scan results, in its own table.
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Will it bloat my database?
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No, and this is one of the things it scans other sites for, so it would be a poor look. Guru Site Health keeps the last 100 detailed scans by default — adjustable from 10 to 2000 in Settings — and removes older ones automatically. Your score history is kept separately in a much smaller table, so the long-term trend survives even though the detail behind old scans does not. Deleting the plugin removes both tables and every option it created.
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Why is one of the modules showing “Not measured”?
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Because it has no data source on this site. That is reported honestly and excluded from your score rather than counted as a failure — a module you cannot measure is not a problem with your site.
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My score is 100 but I know something is wrong
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Guru Site Health only reports what it can verify from inside your server. Real-world page speed, Core Web Vitals and malware detection cannot be measured that way, and it will not pretend otherwise.
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Can I run scans automatically?
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Yes, and it is on by default. Choose hourly, twice daily, daily or weekly in Settings. Note that WordPress’s scheduler only runs when your site receives traffic, so a very quiet site may see scans run late.
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Does it work on multisite?
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Scans run per site and correctly account for network-activated plugins. A central multi-site dashboard is planned for a later release.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“BuildWithGuru Site Health — Score, Site Audit & Monitoring” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “BuildWithGuru Site Health — Score, Site Audit & Monitoring” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.1
- The dashboard now uses its dark theme for everyone, instead of following the browser’s light or dark setting. It previously shipped both, which meant the interface did not match the screenshots for anyone on a light system.
- Browser-drawn controls inside the dashboard — scrollbars, date pickers, select menus — now render dark to match, rather than appearing as white widgets on a dark panel.
1.0.0
- Initial release.
- Six analysis modules: Updates, Security & Configuration, Database, Media, Accessibility and SEO.
- Weighted health score that excludes anything it cannot measure instead of scoring it zero.
- Environment-aware severity, so development sites are not judged as broken production sites.
- Scan history with per-issue comparison between scans, pruned automatically so the table cannot grow without limit.
- Long-term score trend kept in a compact table, so history outlives the detailed scans behind it.
- Score trend over 7, 30, 90 or 365 days, or any custom date range.
- Printable report of every issue, its fix and its evidence — save it as a PDF from your browser.
- Guided first-run introduction, re-openable from the Guide button.
- Optional email reports, sent only on a genuine regression.
- Reads Rank Math and Yoast SEO where present, with clear attribution.
- Scheduled and optionally chunked scanning for large sites.
- REST API under
bwg-site-health/v1. - No external requests of any kind.