WordPress Site Health vs Relvato: config checks vs continuous verification

Two different jobs, often confused

WordPress Site Health (Tools → Site Health) inspects your server and configuration from the inside and gives you a status score plus recommendations. It answers one question: 'is this WordPress install set up correctly?'

Relvato is an external monitoring service that loads your actual pages in a real browser — on a schedule and on every change — and alerts you when something breaks. It answers a different question: 'does the live site still work for visitors right now?' Only one of those tells you the moment your checkout goes down.

What WordPress Site Health checks

Site Health runs a set of tests across two tabs — Status (passed / recommended / critical) and Info (a read-only inventory). The tests are about your environment and configuration: the PHP version and required PHP modules, the database server version, whether the site is served over HTTPS, whether automatic/background updates work, whether the REST API and loopback requests succeed, whether scheduled events (wp-cron) run, and whether page or persistent object caching is in place. It also flags inactive themes and plugins and whether debug mode is left on.

How it runs matters. Site Health computes its score when you open the page, and refreshes a subset of tests on a weekly wp-cron event. wp-cron only fires when your site receives traffic, and nothing notifies you — you have to remember to visit the page. It's a manual, on-demand audit, not a monitor.

Within that scope it's genuinely useful: it's the right place to catch an outdated PHP version, a missing extension, or a broken cron setup. But every check is a server-side self-report — Site Health never opens your front-end as a visitor.

What Relvato checks

Relvato verifies the parts of your site that visitors actually touch, from outside, in a real Chromium / Firefox / WebKit browser. That includes real user journeys — guest and logged-in checkout, customer login, password reset — plus uptime and SSL from the public internet, visual regression and structure drift, broken links and images, Core Web Vitals (a lab run) and real-user Web Vitals (RUM), SEO/AEO integrity, and security checks like file integrity and a vulnerability scan.

It runs continuously: on a schedule and automatically on every change — a plugin, theme or core update, or a deploy — so a risky change is re-verified within seconds. When something fails, Relvato alerts you by email and in the dashboard, keeps the history, and correlates the failure with the change that caused it.

The Relvato WordPress plugin does connect to your site — it reports change events and enables deep, stateful checks (a real test checkout, email delivery, file integrity) that need server context. But the verification itself happens in Relvato's browsers, from a visitor's perspective, and the alert reaches you.

Where they overlap

There's a small overlap. Both care about HTTPS: Site Health flags an HTTPS misconfiguration, and Relvato's SSL check verifies the live certificate is valid and not about to expire. Both touch reachability: Site Health's loopback test confirms WordPress can call itself, while Relvato's uptime check confirms the site actually responds to the public. Both are aware, in some form, of scheduled tasks and email.

But even where they overlap, the vantage point is opposite. Site Health asks the server 'are you configured for this?'; Relvato asks a browser on the open internet 'does this actually work?' A certificate can be 'configured' and still serve an expired chain to visitors — Site Health passes, Relvato fails.

Where Relvato goes far beyond Site Health

The gap is large, and it's the part that costs you customers. Site Health never loads your checkout, so it can't tell you a payment button broke after an update. It never renders your pages, so it can't catch a layout that collapsed or a section that vanished. It doesn't measure your real visitors' speed, crawl for 404s, check your SEO tags, or watch for a supply-chain change in a plugin file.

And crucially, Site Health doesn't watch — it waits to be opened, and never alerts. Relvato is continuous and event-driven, verifies real journeys in a real browser, measures real-user performance, and emails you the moment something regresses, with the change that likely caused it. That's the difference between a checklist you might run and a safety net that's always on.

So do you still need Site Health? Use both.

Keep Site Health — it's free, built in, and the right tool for a one-off environment and configuration audit: PHP version, extensions, cron, caching. Run it when you set up or migrate a site.

Then add Relvato for the job Site Health was never designed to do: continuously prove that the live site works for real visitors, and tell you the instant it doesn't. One checks the setup; the other checks that it keeps working.