So you and your team made this AMAZING website, right?
Hours and hours of planning and photographing and coding and designing and on and on and on. You expect your employees to add their best work to this website, but there’s only one problem…you don’t know who has added elements and made changes to your site. How are you supposed to see which one of your talented employees posted this insanely awesome blog or find out if an unwanted visitor is trying to hack your site?
That’s where Activity Log comes into play. Activity Log is a plugin provided by WordPress that monitors and tracks your site’s activity. This open source software breaks down what activity is occurring on your website and who is doing that activity. Examples of elements that you can track include: when Settings are edited, when pages and posts are being created or deleted, when media elements are being added or deleted, and so much more.
What do we use Activity Log for and why we recommend it to others
At Running Robots, we have a small but mighty team of eight individuals. All eight of us work together to achieve outstanding quality websites and digital platforms for our clients. Since we care so much about what we put into our client’s websites, it would only be acceptable to put forth that same effort and care into our own website.
For us, we use Activity Log on websites we have created to track who works on the website. When it comes to our client’s websites, we use it mainly to ensure that if a client edits their website after we launched their site, we can see what they changed and we can correct any errors that came from those edits. We do the same thing with our employees and our Running Robots website. Activity Log also helps by sending notifications when edits are made to a website, if you want it to, which can be beneficial when troubleshooting problems promptly.
Pro Tip:
Ensure you set appropriate log retention policies so that your notifications and edits are recent and easy to sort through when looking at the log files. Using this plugin without configuring the log files can be detrimental to the organization and tracking of changes.
We have also used WP Security Audit Log (currently known as WP Activity Log) to track changes and activities for our website and client’s websites, and we believe it could also be a great alternative.
