What is the Audit Trail?

You can think of the audit trail as an ongoing log of important events that happen on your site.

Why would I need an audit trail?

Often when something bad happens, it's good to be able to know why, so as to help prevent it in the future.

The audit trail assists us in finding the series of events that led to a problem.

e.g. WordPress displays only a blank screen. What events happened recently? Perhaps a plugin upgrade/installation caused it? You wont know unless you can track the series of events that led up to it.

What are the audit trail contexts?

This split up the log into logical areas so you can more easily track related events.

e.g. If you want to view events relating to plugins, enable this context.

We recommend keeping the Shield Plugin context enabled as this keeps a log of security-related events.

What if my audit trail gets very large?

We store audit trail events in its own independent database table, so performance on your site will never be impacted.

You can keep the database table lean by automatically pruning old events. The default for "old" is 14 days.

What's the difference between the options 'Auto-Clean' and 'Max Trial Length'?

Auto-cleaning keeps your audit trail table lean - usually there's no need to retain events older than a couple of weeks.

Max Trial Length is a Pro feature. If you have a busy site you'll need a bigger audit trail.

Free users will be limited to 50 events, Pro subscribers will be unlimited.