Your site works, but you don't know whether it's healthy: the fix that shows you

Everything works — and that's exactly the problem

Your site appears, the forms go through, the orders come in. No reason to worry.

And yet, if someone asked you "is your site healthy?", you probably wouldn't know what to answer. Not for lack of skill: because nothing tells you. A site doesn't warn you that it's declining. It works, it works, it works — and one day it doesn't, generally on the day you had something else to do.

The good news: the declines that end in an incident are almost always visible well in advance, provided you've looked once.

The cause: a site accumulates, and accumulation doesn't show

A WordPress site lives and grows. Every extension installed leaves its settings behind. Every extension uninstalled often leaves its own behind too. Temporary data piles up, drafts and article revisions stack up, internal tables lengthen.

None of this appears on your admin screen. You see your pages, you don't see what's building up underneath. It grows quietly, and one day it weighs: admin pages become slow, backups take forever, a form takes its time answering.

Alongside that, there's the foundation: the PHP version. PHP is the engine that runs WordPress — the software that, on the server, executes your site. Like any engine, its versions have a lifespan: past a certain age, a version stops receiving security fixes. A site on too old a version still works perfectly… until an extension demands better, or a flaw stops being corrected. It's the kind of thing you'd rather learn on a quiet Tuesday morning than on a Friday evening.

The fix: take a snapshot, today

A health check tells you in a few minutes where you stand. Three things to look at, in this order.

1. The PHP version

This is the most rewarding point, and it's settled without touching the site. Your hosting account area shows the version in use, and almost always lets you change it from a dropdown. If you find an old version, don't change anything straight away: make a backup first, then move to the next version, then check that the site responds normally. And if you're not comfortable, write to your host's support — this request is part of their daily routine.

2. The available memory

Every page of your site is built within a limited amount of memory. When that limit is too low for what the site actually does, it shows up as symptoms that look like nothing: an occasional blank page, an image that refuses to upload, an admin screen that cuts out. An extension then gets the blame, often wrongly.

3. The tidiness of the database

Look at what's accumulating in there: settings left behind by deleted extensions, temporary data never cleaned up, article revisions kept by the dozen. This isn't about deleting everything — it's about knowing what's there.

The real benefit isn't today

Here's what makes the exercise useful, and it's counter-intuitive: the snapshot you take today won't teach you much today. It's worth what it will tell you in three months.

With no point of comparison, "my database is 300 MB" means nothing. With a snapshot from three months ago, the same sentence becomes: "my database has doubled since April" — and that is information that calls for action, before the incident rather than after.

That's the difference between monitoring and noting. Taking the first snapshot costs five minutes; not having taken it costs an evening, one day or another.

If you want these snapshots without taking them by hand

AIFORYA Health Check is a free extension that takes these snapshots, keeps their history — that's the whole point — and analyses the hygiene of the database. It also includes an assistant for resolving conflicts between extensions, by methodical elimination.

One point worth underlining, because it matters: it only diagnoses. It looks and it reports; it changes nothing on your site. It runs 100% on your own server, with no API key and no outside service.