WordPress runs over 40 percent of the web, which means it also breaks in wonderfully standardised ways: the white screen, the database error, the plugin update that eats the layout, the compromised theme quietly serving spam. If you look after WordPress sites, for yourself or for clients, the failure modes are predictable enough that every one of them can be watched automatically. This guide covers the eight checks that matter, roughly in the order they will save you.
1. Uptime, with retries
The foundation, with one WordPress-specific note: shared hosting, where most WordPress lives, throws transient errors constantly. A monitor that alerts on a single failed request will cry wolf weekly; one that retries before alerting tells you about real outages only. That distinction is most of the difference between monitoring you trust and monitoring you mute.
2. The classic WordPress error screens
WordPress fails with specific, detectable text on the page:
- "Error establishing a database connection", the big one, covered in depth in our dedicated fix guide.
- "There has been a critical error on this website", the modern white screen of death, usually a fatal PHP error from a plugin or theme.
- "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance", the
.maintenancefile left behind by an update that died halfway. The update finished failing hours ago; the page stays.
Here is the catch: caching and proxy layers can serve these error pages with a healthy 200 status, so an uptime check sails past them. The reliable detector is a content rule that alerts if any monitored page ever contains those phrases, a two-minute setup in content monitoring that catches all three regardless of status code.
3. Update breakage you can see
Plugin and theme updates are WordPress's biggest source of self-inflicted damage, and the damage is usually visual: a broken layout, a vanished slider, a checkout button pushed off-screen. The page loads, returns 200, and looks wrong. Visual monitoring compares rendered screenshots against a baseline, so the morning after auto-updates run, you know whether anything actually changed for humans. Pair it with a habit: schedule auto-updates for a time when someone will see the alerts.
4. Versions, updates and the plugin inventory
Outdated plugins are the single biggest WordPress attack vector, so "what version is everything, everywhere?" is a security question, not housekeeping. Across a portfolio this is unmanageable by hand; TLDTrack's free WordPress plugin reports core, theme and plugin versions and pending updates into the same dashboard as your other checks, so the site running a plugin with a known exploit stops being a mystery you discover during an incident.
5. Malware and blacklists
WordPress's popularity makes it the primary target for automated compromise, and as we covered in how to tell if your site has been hacked, modern infections hide rather than deface. Continuous blacklist and malware monitoring catches the flag the moment Google or a blocklist raises it, and content rules catch the injected spam keywords often days earlier.
6. The SEO furniture
Two WordPress-specific SEO landmines deserve their own checks. First, the "Discourage search engines" checkbox: ticked on staging, then the database gets copied to production, and the live site is quietly telling Google to go away via a noindex. Second, SEO plugin misconfigurations that rewrite titles and meta descriptions site-wide. Monitoring page titles, meta tags and robots directives turns both from a slow rankings bleed into a same-day alert.
7. Performance drift
Every plugin adds weight, every page builder adds more, and WordPress sites get slower by accretion rather than decision. Scheduled PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals checks give you the trend line, so "the site got slow" becomes "the site got slow in March, when these three plugins were added", which is a fixable statement.
8. The stack underneath
None of the above matters if the domain lapses, the SSL certificate expires or a DNS record gets mangled. The layers below WordPress, DNS, certificates, renewals, email authentication, fail less often but fail bigger, and they belong in the same dashboard, not in four other tools.
Putting it together
For one site, this list is an afternoon of setup. For an agency portfolio it is the difference between managing WordPress and being managed by it: every site, every layer, one alerting pipeline, with the noisy checks tuned and the critical ones routed to push. That consolidated approach is the whole argument of our complete guide to monitoring client websites, and WordPress, with its standardised failure modes, is where it pays off fastest.
