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.
What it checks
Every check below runs on your own site, with no account and no setup.
- Updates — outdated core, plugins and themes, PHP versions past their security-support date, and whether anything is blocking automatic updates from landing.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.
- 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.
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.
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.
- A short guided introduction on first run, and a Guide button to read it again whenever you like.
- A REST API exposes every scan, so the data is yours to use.
- Fully translatable.
Screenshots
Installation
- Upload the plugin through Plugins Add New Upload Plugin, or install it from the plugin directory.
- Activate it.
- Open Guru Site Health in the admin menu and click Run scan.
There is no setup wizard and nothing to configure before your first scan. Automatic daily scanning is enabled from activation and can be turned off in Settings.
Requires PHP 8.1 or newer. On an older version the plugin shows a notice and deactivates itself rather than breaking your site.
FAQ
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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
1.0.0
- 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.