Health Check – so confused by new interface

  • Resolved richbhanover

    (@richbhanover)


    5 years, 10 months ago

    I have always liked Health Check because it gave an simple, impartial view of the overall health and configuration of my server.

    The new version (I’m using Health Check 1.3.2 on WP 5.2…) seems to have lost some of that simplicity. (But I don’t mind that it moved out of the Dashboard section of the menu.)

    Now, I’m an old software guy. If you told me that this plugin is better because it consolidates information in a better way, then I could be convinced. But here are the things I note about the new interface:

    – In the Status tab, it would be good to display the recommendations explicitly.
    * Which plugins are inactive (although there is a link to inactive plugins)
    * Which themes are inactive (There’s no way to see inactive themes…)
    * What version PHP is installed, and the recommended version (I have to guess)
    * What recommended modules are missing (you already do this – thanks!)
    * etc…

    – In the menu on the left, Site Health has a “1” in red. But the rest of the page shows 0 critical’s and four recommendations. What does the red “1” refer to? (Today the red “1” has disappeared, but I haven’t changed anything. Why?)

    – The previous Health Check had a single color-coded (green + and yellow -) summary page that showed the tests and their results. I think that this informaiton is now in the “Info” tab. But I can’t see them all at once, without clicking each of the disclosure widgets (the “V”). Is there a way to open them all at once? Is there the equivalent yellow/green flags?

    – Do you still check whether there’s a Git repository present? Other reasons that WP won’t update automatically? (The old version saved my neck a couple times pointing out problems.)

    – There’s a small circle next to the Site Health heading (see image below). On the status page, it’s “…”, on other pages, it shows 60%. What does this mean?

    You can see an image at: https://imgur.com/gallery/HR9skZi

    Many thanks!

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  • Plugin Author Marius L. J.

    (@clorith)

    Hiya,

    Apologies for not noticing your topic here sooner, let’s see if we can get through this together ??

    The PHP versions were removed on recommendations by copywriters, as the numbers meant little the the average user, we are looking at ways to re-introduce them in a friendlier manner though, so any suggestions are more than welcome in that regard.

    The little red badge next to the menu item (the one you had displaying 1) is actually how many critical issues existed the last time the Site Health Check ran. It runs once a week automatically, and also whenever you visit the page, of course a critical issue might have been resolved between the weekly check, and when you visit the page manually, unfortunately this isn’t something we can reliably determine. It should be noted that this part is a little experiment to see what works well to draw attention to critical issues that users should be aware of, so is likely going to change.

    You are correct that we used to show a color-coded (with icons) list, but this had some drawbacks, unimportant information was mixed in between serious issues and recommendations, it got a bit messy. I also discovered that the color coding was not accessibility friendly. We addressed this by instead separating the page out into passing, recommended and critical results, where passing ones are hidden by default as they’re not the ones the user should focus on (this is in the Site Health tab still though).

    All the checks from previous iterations are still there, so it does check for version controlled content or other things that may block updates just like before.

    The circle is a little bit confusing, I totally get that. on the Site Health page, it will show the ellipsis (the “…”) while checks are running, as some of them take a bit of time to complete, so it was better to display the page, and run some tests asynchronously like this. The ellipsis will be replaced with a digit once the tests are completed (this is why the other tabs show a number straight away, they’re not running the tests, only displaying the results it had gotten so far). This is also changing in the next iteration, as we discovered the wrong focus was put into the value of this number (it’s a percentage indicator of how many tests are completed, not how perfect ones site is), so this will become much clearer moving forward (the work on that can be seen at https://github.com/WordPress/health-check/issues/342 if you like following along with things).

    Hopefully that clears up some of the confusion, I totally understand that the sudden change can be a bit daunting, it was part of a major UI and UX overhaul before parts of the plugin were included with WordPress 5.2, to align with the direction the admin interface is moving in.

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