The site health audit

This is the one I hand people who are nervous about letting AI near their site, because it cannot change anything. It reads, it measures, it ranks what it found by impact, and it touches nothing.

It is also just a good audit. Most speed plugins tell you about images and caching, because those are the things a plugin can see from inside the page. The expensive problems usually live somewhere a plugin cannot look — an options table full of settings for software you deleted in 2021, a scheduler table with a few hundred thousand rows, a query with no index that runs on every request.

What it checks

• Autoloaded options — the data WordPress reads in full on every single page view
• Table sizes, row counts, and the usual suspects for runaway growth
• Post revisions, transients, orphaned metadata
• Scheduled events, including ones left behind by removed plugins
• Plugin count and what each one is actually doing on the front end
• Core, PHP and database versions against what is current

The rule it runs under

Read-only. It is written so that every command it is allowed to run only reads, and so that the correct response to “should I just fix it?” is to write the fix down and wait. You get a ranked list and a set of proposed commands, and you decide.

Run the audit, read the list, and then hand the top item back as its own task. That sequencing is most of the value — the ranking is what stops you spending a Saturday on the third most important problem.