Download WordPress File Monitor Plus
In this video you’ll learn how to add layer of protection to your WordPress website and get a piece of mind knowing that you have a lever against website malware and phishing attacks. I want to talk about monitoring file changes, particularly about WordPress File Monitor Plus plugin.
WordPress File Monitor Plus
What WordPress File Monitor Plus does – it monitors files under your WordPress installation for changes. When a change occurs, it notifies you by email and shows alert in admin dashboard. WordPress File Monitor Plus was not designed for prevention it is rather monitoring and healing tool in your arsenal. Hundreds of websites get hacked and infected with malware and malicious code every day and if you ever had been hacked you know how frustrating it is and time consuming to clean up all the mess – in order to find and delete all the malware and phishing files you often have to manually analyze your server error and access logs which is both time-consuming and frustrating process.
How does it work?
WordPress File Monitor Plus acts like file integrity monitor – it monitors your website for any added/deleted/changed files, so if a hacker manages to modify or add any files in your WordPress installation you will get email notification and alert in the WordPress admin dashboard showing you exactly which files has been modified or added. This makes process of cleaning and removing any spam and malware from the website much easier as you know exactly where to look and what files have been affected.
How to exclude files and folders from monitoring
Often times you have certain plugins that need to create files and files that are frequently modified like error logs, backup status notifications or cache files if you’re using any type of caching plugin. There is nothing wrong with those files but you don’t want to receive false alerts and that is why you need to specify what files and folders you want to ignore from monitoring. Let’s say I want to ignore all image files, all I have to do is specify file extensions I want plugin to ignore, or I want to exclude all files in CATCHA folder – all I have to do is add full path to that folder with the * at the end:
/home/user/public_html/wp-content/uploads/wpcf7_captcha/*
Here is common list of files you might want to ignore
add this to “Dirs/Files To Ignore” if you want to ignore all error logs
*/error_log
If you still want to monitor error logs but want to ignore one specific error log simply add add full path to that error_log file like
/home/user/public_html/wp-admin/error_log
*/sitemap.xml
add this if you want to ignore all sitemaps, replace “sitemap” with the name of the actual sitemap file if it is different from default used by most plugins and tools.
*/ftpquota
add this to ignore all ftpquata files
