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With WordPress bigger than ever there’s certainly no shortage of plugins out there that will help you with your auditing. That in itself poses a problem as you can often be spoilt for choice, and left unsure about which direction to go in. To make things simpler we’ve created a simple 3-minute read that will tell you everything there is to know about the very best WordPress Audit Plugins in 2019.
Why do I need to know about WordPress Audit Plugins?
Good question! When you have multiple people working on your site, or when it’s just you and you want everything to run smoothly, you need to keep a clear record of what changed, and when. This is what an audit plugin does, and it can be worth its weight in gold if you wake up one morning to incompatibility issues that seem to have come out of nowhere. You’ll also be able to audit how your users are interacting with your content, and make any changes needed to optimize outreach and engagement.
Take a look at the 10 we’ve identified as the best on the market, and then add one to your dashboard today.
#1 Audit Trail
No list of WordPress Audit Plugins would be complete without the aptly named Audit Trail, so what better place to start? It’s a quick and easy-to-use plugin that shows you everything your user community is getting up to. You can analyze page visits, engagements, and it even allows you to restore historical posts if you want to see if you can create a surge of activity.
If you decide to update your content you can use writing services like Trust My Paper
or Grab My Essay to give things a professional polish, or do it yourself by creating precise and concise text using Hemingway.
#2 WP Document Revisions
This is a great option for those of you who really want to scale by embracing the role of community owner. The document management options on offer are a great way to audit changes across your site, but there’s a couple of other creative avenues it offers that you won’t find with many other plugins on this list.
There’s a built-in collaboration tool that allows you to nominate key writers within your content creation team, as well as a file hosting tool that makes it easy for you to get everything live.
#3 Simple History
If you want to audit the changes and additions made to all of your posts, without having to keep a manual list of revisions on your desktop, Simple History is the way to do it.
The GUI is simple and intuitive, and focuses on offering everything you need, and nothing more. That way you can create comprehensive logs grouped by post, page, attachment, comment, and ever user profiles. One of the really useful things is that it will also collate all failed login attempts automatically. Ideal if you want to avoid being a victim of a DoS attack that could have been prevented if you knew what to look for.
#4 WP Security Audit Log
This is a real key plugin for those of you looking to carry about comprehensive security audits with the click of a button. It tracks new users, profile modifications, and password changes so that you can stay on top of what’s going on. It even tracks changes to the product information on WooCommerce and notifies you when your users activate or deactivate plugins.
#5 Stream
If you want a quick and efficient set of tools then you’re going to need to add this plugin to your toolkit. Stream shows every action, change, and modification in a simple chronological feed that’s designed to be as easy to follow as your social media. If you combine it with other tools like Best Essay (content creation assistance) and Grammarly (a clever way to fine-tune your writing) then you’ll have everything you need to keep things running smoothly.
#6 Activity Log
This quick and easy plugin allows you to record which users are interacting with your blog, and how they’re doing it. It will alert you to any attempts to hack or modify your content without permission — something that will give you peace of mind that your site is in safe hands when you’re not online. It also allows you to grant permission access to certain pages and users so that you can tailor the access of your community. Ideal if you want to set up member’s only content for example.
#7 Sucuri Security
If you want to keep your site safe by being able to automatically identify hacking attempts then this is the way to do it. It will check the security credentials of each user, see if they have recently modified their password or profile in a significant way, and also check whether any sites they link out to have recently been blacklisted.
It’s also got a built-in malware scanner that will prevent Trojan horse style attacks in which malicious code is hidden in seemingly innocuous attachments. Ideal if you want to sleep with the peace of mind that everything is under control.
#8 BTEV
This is a great little plugin for those of you who want to delve into the detail when it’s auditing time. It has a simple GUI in which you’re given a scrolling feed of all user logins, password changes, and content uploads such as likes and comments. Everything is clearly visible via a dedicated RSS feed which you can password protect for good measure. By highlighting the key things you need to pay closer attention to with a ‘Warning’ label it instantly makes you sit up and take notice.
#9 Content Audit
Duplicate content, whether intentional or otherwise, will damage your SEO like nothing else. That’s why Content Audit allows you to create a comprehensive inventory of everything that goes live. It will also highlight the pages which are underperforming in terms of engagement and clickthroughs so that you can focus your efforts on them.
If you combine this proactive approach with tools like Wow Grade (fast content creation), Google Docs (perfect for collaboration and brainstorming), and
Supreme Dissertations (specialists in long-form content) you’ll really be onto something.
#10 Pagezii Seo Agency
No list of audit plugins would be complete without a tool that audits your SEO efforts. The best one we’ve seen in a long time is Pagezii, and it’s a great way to ensure readability and rankings work together in perfect harmony.
It also factors in the social reach of your content, as well as any visual elements, and produces a self-contained audit report which you can then email off in PDF format. This makes it ideal for not only auditing your own site, but also providing detailed feedback to any clients you may have who have come to you for SEO optimization.
Final Thoughts
We hope this simple introduction has told you everything you need to know when you’re shopping for WordPress Audit Plugins. We’ve linked to each of them so that when you decide which one you want to go for, all you have to do is click a button. Ideal if you want to ensure you keep costly downtime to an absolute minimum the smarter way.
