Look after your Wordpress site health
fixing these issues will protect your website
WordPress site health
Recently I encountered 2 critical issues and WordPress site health fixes issues I wanted to share with you. These critical issues are caused by the server. You can check your WordPress site health status by going to the Site Health Status on the dashboard or by Tools > Site Health – giving the recommendations needed.
Critical site health issues
1. Rest API (Representational State Transfer)
One of the primary critical WordPress site health fixes was the REST API. This is basically a set of rules for communication between a client and server. The error in this instance was reporting cURL error 28 Connection timed out which means the curl could not send a receive an HTTP request back from the server.
Curl is a tool for transferring data to and from a server and for making various types of requests and for testing rest API’s.
In this instance when loading the site, it was scanning around the internet trying to resolve the site rather than looking on the current server to resolve.
This was because of a firewall, so the hosts file on the server was then updated with the full non WWW and WWW version of the site.
This has now resolved this issue.
2.Recommended PHP Extensions
WordPress requires certain PHP extensions to be installed, in this instance there were 5 modules not available. Without these all being enabled you may encounter issues with your site within WordPress.
A few of these were:
- imagick – Provides better image quality for media uploads
- exif – Works with metadata stored in images.
- Fileinfo – Used to detect mimetype of file uploads.
- gd – If Imagick isn’t installed, the GD Graphics Library is used as a functionally limited fallback for image manipulation.
Resolution
I was able to resolve most of them by logging into my hosting and into apache and adding the extensions that were already not installed on that PHP version. WordPress recommends version 7.3 or above, this is for security reasons to protect your website.
For modules that are not already installed, speak to your host provider, and ask them to install the desired PHP extensions.
Click the link below for a full list of the php extensions used by WordPress.
https://make.wordpress.org/hosting/handbook/handbook/server-environment/#php-extensions
These WordPress site health fixes should help when faced with similar issues. Stay Safe everyone.
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