How to Track and Monitor User Activity in WordPress
Do you want to track and monitor user activity on your website?
As your business grows and you add more authors and members to your website, it’s important to log user activity at all times. This way, each user will be accountable for their actions and, in critical situations, you can quickly locate the source of the problem.
Tracking and keeping logs of user activity can also help uncover any potential security threats or malicious activity. This way, you can take action before the attack occurs and protect your website from hackers.
In this article, we’ll show you how to easily track user activity in WordPress so you can keep track of what’s happening on your website.
Why should you track and monitor user activity in WordPress?
Monitoring user activity can be a positive step toward identifying honest mistakes.
If your website goes down, you can check the activity log to see what went wrong and when it started. You’ll be able to identify problems more quickly and take steps to fix your website right away.
This also helps to create an internal knowledge base for your team members . With user activity logs, you can note down common errors and create documentation on best practices to follow.
Wondering what you can control on your website? Here are some of the use cases:
- Comment Moderation: With an active WordPress blog, you will receive comments and will need a moderator or multiple moderators to actively approve legitimate comments. By keeping track of moderators’ activity, you can educate them on which comments need to be approved and which comments do not fit with your blog’s policy.
- Website Updates: If you have a large website with multiple developers and designers actively working on it, you should know which person made a particular update. This way, you can fix any bugs or botched updates and also coach your team members on them.
- Installing Themes and Plugins: Every WordPress website requires a theme and several plugins to run online. When a theme or plugin is installed it can affect the performance of your website and cause incompatibility issues. Instead of deactivating all plugins, you can use the log to find which plugin was installed before the problem started.
- Affiliate Links: Affiliates are the revenue generators for any blog. You should track any changes made to your affiliate links to ensure you are sending traffic to the right websites.
Note: A few years ago, Syed Balkhi , costa rica phone number library founder of WPBeginner, caught a freelance developer changing some of his affiliate links. With the help of the User Activity Log plugin, Syed identified the problem and quickly fixed it.
Tracking and controlling user activity in WordPress
There are many tools that how to sell on wordpress with paypal (step by step) allow you to take advantage of tracking and monitoring user activity. We recommend using WP Activity Log , the best WordPress user activity logging and security plugin on the market.
WP Activity Log is a trusted plugin, and we actively use it on many of our websites. Here’s what you can expect from the plugin:
- Track WordPress User Activity
- Identify any potential threats/attacks
- Actively monitor suspicious behavior
- Fix minor issues
- Send SMS and email notifications about important events
- Maintains a comprehensive log of user activity for small and large events
With all these benefits, let’s see how to track and hong kong data monitor user activity in WordPress with the WP Activity Log plugin.
Step 1. Install and activate the WP Activity Log plugin
The first thing you need to do is visit the WP Activity Log website and purchase the plugin.
You will then receive an email with installation instructions and a link to download the plugin. You can upload and activate the plugin on your website. For more details, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin .
After activation, the plugin will ask you to add a license key.
You will find your license key in the same email with the installation instructions.
Once you paste it here, click the Accept and Activate License button , and you will see the success message.
Step 2. Monitor the Activity Log Viewer in WordPress
By default, the Activity Log Viewer will track all movements on your website. This includes user logins, plugin installations, etc.
You will need to visit the WP Activity Log » Log Viewer page in your WordPress admin panel to monitor the user activity log.
It shows you details like:
- Gravity
- Date of the activity
- User data
- IP address
- Object
- Type of event
- Activity message.
For example, when a plugin is installed on your site, in the activity log, you can see which user installed the plugin, at what time, along with the plugin details.
Step 3. Control event and activity tracking in WordPress Control event and activity tracking in WordPress
If you want to control user activity logs and track specific events on your website, you will need to visit the WP Activity Log » Enable/Disable Events page .