Site Monitoring

On WordPress.com sites with hosting features activated, you can access useful metrics to help troubleshoot problems with your site. This guide will explain how to use the information in the Site Monitoring tool.

Access the Site Monitoring Tools

You can access your metrics by following these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Click the Overview button.
3. Click the Monitoring tab.

Metrics

The Metrics tab contains several graphs with real-time information. Each graph is explained in the following sections of this guide.

Server Performance

The server performance chart gives you an idea of how well your site handles visitors. For example, if your e-commerce store has a big sale, you will probably see a spike in requests per minute as people rush to your site to purchase products, and it’s okay if you see the average response time increase slightly. 

WordPress.com is ready to handle these big bursts in traffic to your site and keep the average response time low. However, if you see a sharp increase that stays constant, it’s wise to debug your site further.

The graph displays two lines:

• Requests per minute: This is how many requests your server sees per minute. When a person visits your site, multiple requests are associated with each pageview. For example, each image displayed on a page counts as a separate request.
• Average response time: This is an average of how long it takes for the site to handle and respond to the request. Anything between 100-250ms is very fast. Anything under 500ms is pretty good.

HTTP Request Methods

The HTTP request methods chart shows the percentage of traffic per HTTP request method:

• GET: Retrieve information from a specified resource.
  • This is the most commonly-used HTTP request, as browsers use it to retrieve page content and images from websites. Websites experiencing heavy traffic typically encounter a high volume of GET requests.
• POST: Submit data to be processed to a specified resource.
  • POST requests are primarily used to interact with dynamic resources, such as uploading files, posting comments, or submitting forms. eCommerce websites often experience a significant number of POST requests due to actions like browsing products, adding items to carts, and completing purchases.
• HEAD: Retrieve only the headers of a specified resource without the actual data.
  • HEAD requests are less common compared to GET and POST methods. They are primarily utilized by crawlers, bots, and performance monitoring tools to retrieve page headers or check the status of a resource without downloading its full content. Search engines also employ HEAD requests for website indexing purposes.
• DELETE: Request the removal of a specified resource.
  • DELETE requests are infrequent as they typically can only come from authorized users. They are commonly used to revoke website access, delete posts, or cancel orders.

Response Types

The Response Types chart shows the percentage of dynamic versus static responses:

• Static responses are the parts of your site that stay the same regardless of looking at them, like images or your CSS files. 
• Dynamic responses are unique to each visitor, and they are needed for the cart and checkout pages on an e-commerce site since the content will vary according to what products your visitor is planning to buy.

A higher percentage of static responses will result in faster page loads. However, you should ensure you’re striking a balance so that your visitors are still getting a personalized experience when interacting with your site.

Successful HTTP responses

The Successful HTTP responses chart indicates how many requests were completed by the server without errors.

These are the success response codes that are shown:

• 200 HTTP: The page loaded successfully.
• 301 HTTP: The page is permanently moved to a new location, like when you create a new Contact page and want to direct everyone from the old one to the new one.
• 302 HTTP: The page is temporarily moved to a new location, like when you temporarily redirect people from your homepage to a special event page you’re promoting.

Unsuccessful HTTP responses

The Unsuccessful HTTP responses chart indicates how many requests encountered errors or issues during processing. While you don’t necessarily need to “fix” these (for example, a 401 response is your site blocking an unauthorized request), the charts over time can help diagnose some other reported problem.

These are the unsuccessful response codes that are shown:

• 400 HTTP Bad Request: The server doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do, maybe because something is misspelled or a file is too big.
• 401 HTTP Unauthorized: The server blocked access to a restricted area, like when someone tries to view a page that requires a paid subscription.
• 403 HTTP Forbidden: The server knows what you want to do but doesn’t let you, such as when you try to reach the dashboard without the proper login credentials.
• 404 HTTP Not Found: The server can’t find what you’re looking for, whether it’s clicking on a broken link or typing in a URL to a page that doesn’t exist.
• 500 HTTP Internal Server Error: A server-specific error where it couldn’t fulfill the request, whether it’s due to a coding error that prevents the server from functioning correctly or it was so overwhelmed with too many requests that it timed out.

Access PHP Logs and Webserver Logs

You can access your logs by following these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Click the Overview button.
3. Click the Logs tab.

PHP Logs and Webserver Logs

The PHP Logs tab will show both errors and warnings, while the Webserver Logs tab will show all requests made to the server.

Logs from the past seven days are displayed by default. You can change the date range using the ‘From’ and To’ fields. All dates and times are displayed in the site’s timezone configured in Settings → General.

Turn on the “auto-refresh” toggle to automatically refresh the logs every 10 seconds. When you toggle on auto-refresh, it resets the ‘From’ and ‘To’ fields to the past seven days. Editing the ‘From’ and ‘To’ fields disables auto-refresh mode.

Click the Download logs button to generate a CSV file of the logs. Note that logs can be downloaded with 10,000 entries at a time.

If you receive an error message that reads “Failed to retrieve logs,” you may be downloading more than the limit of 10,000 entries or running into a memory exhaustion error. You can refine your search to a shorter time frame with fewer logs, then try again.

Access PHP Logs via SSH

You may also wish to access your PHP logs while connected to your site via SSH.

1. Connect to your site via SSH.
2. Run the following command: cat /tmp/php-errors