WP Activity Log review: Features, pricing, pros and cons, etc.

WP Activity Log (formerly called WP Security Audit Log) is a popular activity monitoring plugin used to track and maintain a record of actions on your WordPress website, alert admins of suspicious activities, and more. But is it worth the hype? In this detailed WP Activity Log review, we'll put it to the test.

Let me guess, you run a multi-user website or multisite network and are looking for a way to monitor actions that take place on your site(s).

You've heard of the WP Activity Log plugin and are wondering whether it's actually solid or if it’s all hype. Don't worry, you've stumbled on the right article.

In this review of the WP Activity Log plugin, we’ll take an in-depth look at its features, how it works, pricing, pros and cons, and more, to help determine if it's the best option to keep tabs on changes to your WordPress website.

Ready? Let's kick off with a quick overview of what WP Activity Log does and its key features.

What is the WP Activity Log plugin?

WP Activity Log is a robust freemium security plugin that enables site admins to keep tabs on activities on their WordPress site(s).

It was initially released in 2013 and is developed and maintained by Melapress, the same team behind WP 2FA, Captcha 4WP, and Melapress login security.

WP Activity Log uses sensors to track and log every change or action made on your site and provides a clear record of who did what and when.

As you can see from the images below, it keeps a check on a wide array of user and system activities.

Types of events recorded

• IP addresses, user logins, logouts, and unsuccessful login attempts.
• User account creation and deletion.
• User profile updates, such as password and user role changes.
• Site changes, such as theme and plugin installation, activation, deactivation, and deletion.
• Content changes, such as updates to files, posts, pages, and URLs.

Another neat feature is the ability to track changes to third-party plugins on your site. This is useful because many WordPress websites use plugins to add extra functions. It's important to stay in the know about plugin-related changes so you can quickly pinpoint and troubleshoot issues if they occur.

For example, if you run a WordPress ecommerce store, you'll appreciate that it also tracks WooCommerce-related actions, including order modifications, modifications to shipping settings, modifications to accepted payment methods, and lots more (see the below screenshot).

In addition to tracking WooCommerce-related events and activities, WP Activity Log tracks changes to many popular third-party plugins, such as Yoast, MainWP, WPForms, and others.

PS: You can check here for the complete list of actions that WP Activity Log tracks.

Overall, I really like the level of depth WP Activity Log records. For every system and user change, it also assigns a unique code, severity level, and a brief description. This makes it super easy to differentiate between distinct types of events and quickly identify which actions need priority attention.

WP Activity Log's key features

One thing that sets WP Activity Log apart from other activity monitoring tools is that it is a single-function plugin. Its sole focus is tracking actions that occur on websites.

It doesn't include a firewall, malware, second-factor authentication, and other additional functions found in 'all-in-one' WordPress security plugins.

I initially thought this was a drawback. However, I've found that WP Activity Log's exclusive focus is its unique advantage. This is because it translates to an abundant set of features dedicated to monitoring site activity and an intuitive user experience (UX). Each feature is implemented well, leading to a superior product overall.

Here's a summary of the WP Activity Log features I found most useful and (I think other site admins will too):

Comprehensive activity tracking

The plugin's primary use is to record every action that takes place on your WordPress website and it does this superbly well. It records everything from user logins and changes to content to plugin activations or deactivations, file modifications, and more.

For instance, if a user updates a post or changes a setting, admins will be able to see exactly who made the change and when it happened.

User management and security

If you run sites with multiple contributors or administrators, you'll appreciate the ability to manage multiple users and control their access levels. It helps prevent unauthorized actions by keeping track of user behavior.

For instance, if a new user account is created or an existing one is deleted, you’ll be notified immediately. Also, you can block multiple concurrent sessions from the same user account. This helps prevent several people from accessing your site using the same login credentials.

Real-time alerts

You can set up triggers to notify you in real time when specific actions are taken on your site. For instance, if someone tries to install a new plugin or delete a page, you’ll receive an instant email and/or SMS notification.

Being made aware of changes immediately they occur enables you to respond to potential security threats or mistakes quickly.

In-depth reporting

Detailed reports are useful for audits and compliance checks or just for maintaining updated records. Whether you want to review all activities in a certain timeframe or filter actions by a specific user, WP Activity Log enables you to generate custom reports as needed.

You can run reports ad hoc or routinely and automatically send them to specified email addresses.

Robust log data management options

By default, each site's activity log is conveniently stored in its WordPress database. You can use the default log storage settings or set up archiving to store logs older than a specific time period in an external database for better security.

WP Activity Log's plans and pricing

Similar to other Melapress plugins like WP 2FA, WP Activity Log follows a freemium pricing model. They currently offer three plans:

• Free: The free plan is pretty generous for all the features included. It lets you keep a detailed record of all events on your website. There are no limits on activity logging and it includes free text based search.
• Premium: The Premium plan includes all the features in the free version. It also includes robust search filters, instant email and SMS notifications, ad-hoc and scheduled email reports, and more.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan includes all the features in the Premium version. Plus, it includes activity log archiving, the option to save your activity logs in external databases, priority support, and more.

Prices for each plan change based on the number of site licenses you purchase.

It's also great that they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. So if needed, you can try out its paid versions risk-free to determine if it is the right fit for your website.

How to set up the WP Activity Log plugin

When it comes to activity monitoring plugins, WP Activity Log is as robust as it gets. So an exhaustive walkthrough of its settings is beyond the scope of this WP Activity Log review.

However, to help you get started quickly, I'll run you through how to add it to your WordPress site. Also, we'll explore its key tabs.

Add WP Activity Log to your site

First, get the free or one of the pro versions of the WP Activity Log plugin. Then install and activate it on your WordPress site.

After activating the plugin, you'll notice a new "WP Activity Log" tab in the left sidebar of your WordPress admin panel.

If you're using any of the plugin's premium versions, you'll need to enter your license key (found in your post-purchase welcome email). Then click "Agree & Activate License" to conclude the activation process.

Log Viewer

Think of the Log Viewer tab as the central hub for monitoring activity on your WordPress site. It provides a detailed, real-time list of all the actions taken on your website — user logins, post edits, plugin installations, and more. This log is chronological, so the most recent activities appear at the top.

Each entry in the log includes essential details like the date and time of the action, the user who performed it, and what was changed. This helps you quickly identify any suspicious behavior or simply keep track of ongoing updates.

Search and filters

If you manage a WordPress site that has multiple contributors or a high volume of activity, the amount of data recorded in the activity logs can be overwhelming.

The Log Viewer tab includes powerful search and filter options that make it easy to quickly sift through extensive log data and home in on specific actions, users, or events as needed. There are tons of filter parameters, such as date range, users, event IDs, event type, severity level, etc., which you can use to refine the results and narrow down your search to only the most relevant details.

For instance, let's say you receive a security alert for a particular user which prompts you to find out all the activities they performed over the past week. You can enter their username into the search bar then filter by date range and user name and instantly get a list of pertinent events.

Another common example where this can be useful is if you suspect that a plugin you recently installed on your site is responsible for a host of issues. You can easily search for all plugin-related activities over the relevant timeframe and spot the root cause of the problem within seconds.

Email & SMS Notifications

The Email & SMS Notifications tab is where you can tailor the email and SMS settings that govern notification alerts sent to admins. This helps ensure that you’re always informed about critical events on your site, even during times when you’re not logged into your WordPress dashboard.

You can pick which activities to be notified about. For example, you might want to enable a daily summary of your site's activity log, suspicious activity like failed logins or failed login attempts for non-existing users, changes to plugins and themes, content changes, and more.

There's also the option to customize built-in notification templates or build custom triggers from scratch based on a set of criteria that sends email and/or SMS notifications to alert admins when specific actions occur.

Reports

The Reports tab provides you with a way to generate comprehensive summaries of the activities recorded by the WP Activity Log plugin. This is handy for site audits, compliance documentation, or simply getting a big-picture view of how your site is being managed.

Activity log reports can be customized based on various criteria for the time frame you’re interested in. Common criteria includes:

• The type of activities you want to track.
• Specific users or roles.
• Severity level.

For example, if you want to review all the changes made to your website’s content over the past month, you can generate a report that highlights every post edit, comment moderation, and page update.

Once reports are generated, you can export them in both HTML and CSV formats. This makes it easy to share them with team members or store them for your records.

Logged in Users

The Logged-in Users tab provides a real-time view of all users currently active on your WordPress site. You'll see their username along with important details like their role (e.g., admin, editor, customer), IP address, what actions they might be performing, and more.

You can also use the "User Sessions Management" sub-tab to modify policies that manage the users' sessions on your site.

Integrations

The Integrations tab contains a host of tabs where you can easily set up integrations with external platforms like AWS CloudWatch, Loggly, Papertrail, and more.

Below, we'll explore each tab within “Integrations”.

Connections

The Connections tab is where you can set up and manage integrations between your WordPress site and external log management platforms. As of this writing, supported platforms include AWS CloudWatch, Log file(s), Loggly, MySQL Database, Papertrail, Slack, and Syslog server.

For instance, if you want to send your WordPress activity logs to Loggly so you can mirror and monitor all logs from a single, unified dashboard, you can easily integrate both platforms using the Connections Wizard in this tab.

The setup process typically involves entering the required credentials and choosing your preferred options. Once connected, WP Activity Log will start sending logs to the external platforms as configured.

External Storage

By default, WP Activity Log stores all recorded log data in your WordPress database. Naturally, this can end up consuming a lot of space on your site's server over time. The External Storage tab allows you to configure the external database where your activity logs are stored outside of your WordPress site.

This can be handy in lots of situations. For example:

• If you want to keep logs for much longer periods
• To better comply with data retention policies like GDPR
• To free up some space on your server
• If your WordPress site experiences issues or needs to be restored from a backup

Archiving

Archiving is useful when you need to keep a long-term record of activities but don't want to clutter your active database with old data. The difference between archiving logs and simply storing them in an external database is that archived logs are typically compressed and stored separately. This reduces the load on your live site while still making sure that the data is accessible when needed.

From here, you can set up rules to automatically archive logs after a certain period, such as 30, 60, or 90 days and manage how your logs are stored over time. This is particularly valuable for sites that must retain records for several years to maintain compliance with legal or regulatory requirements.

Mirroring

The Mirroring tab allows you to duplicate your WordPress activity logs to Loggly, AWS Cloudwatch and several other third party cloud-based log management and analytics services. This feature allows site admins to store the logs with all the other logs from all other services and devices, allowing them to better understand what is happening on their websites and any other service or device on the network.

Also, mirrored logs ensure that your logs are preserved securely and can be easily accessed as needed.

Enable/Disable events

WP Activity Log records a massive amount of actions on a site. While this can be useful, it can quickly get overwhelming for sites that don't need that level of activity monitoring. Luckily, you can easily customize the activities you wish to track in this tab.

Your selections here determine the event types and descriptions displayed. You can enable or disable specific events by checking or unchecking boxes.

Pro tip: If you're starting with a fresh WP Activity Log install, I recommend waiting for a few days before you modify event tracking parameters. This way, you'll have a better grasp of the weight of each event tracked before you customize them.

Settings

As the name implies, this tab contains the main settings that control how the plugin works. Let's explore the sub-tabs within it.

General

Here, you can choose to add a dedicated WP Activity Log widget that showcases your site's five most recent events on the admin dashboard homepage. You can also decide whether to add a message to user login pages on your site to notify users that their activities on your site are being recorded.

This page is also where you can control which site administrators can access and modify WP Activity Log's settings. And you can enable other users apart from admins to view events on your site.

Another useful setting here is that it lets you decide whether or not to hide the WP Activity Log plugin from the list of installed plugins. This prevents users with certain roles from seeing that the plugin has been added to your website.

Activity log viewer

On the Activity log viewer tab, you get to choose how long to retain the data collected from all the events on your site. You can either keep all the data or delete events beyond a certain period.

You can also finetune the level of detail shown in the activity log, for example:

• Whether to follow UTC or your site's time zone.
• Whether or not to show milliseconds of each action in the log list view.
• User information to be captured and shown for each activity. This can either be the user's WordPress username, their first and last name, or whatever they have configured as their public display name.

This tab is also where you decide whether or not to maintain a log of the background activity that occurs on your WordPress site, such as deleting post revisions, auto-saved drafts, and others.

File changes

The file changes tab allows you to install another Melapress plugin called File Monitor. Downloading it is 100% optional so you can choose not to add it to your site.

The File Monitor plugin runs scans to track file changes and other settings. It's great for beefing up your site's security practices further.

Folks who do want to install File Monitor will find that it's super easy to do so. They offer a quick one-click install which takes less than a minute. Once the File Monitor plugin is active, this page will display a direct link that you can click to easily access its settings.

Exclude objects

By default, WP Activity Log maintains a record of all changes that occur on your WordPress site.

However, this page lets you choose to exclude certain users, roles, IP addresses, post types, post stages, custom post fields, and custom user fields from the activity log.

Advanced settings

The Advanced settings tab includes a host of settings, which, frankly, most users won't need. Anyway, here's an overview of its capabilities.

First of all, you get the option to reset the plugin back to its default settings. This means that all the settings that you've configured to make the plugin work how you want will be reset to their factory state. This includes settings around email notifications, scheduled reports, third-party services, connections, and more.

Another option is to purge the activity log from your site. That means it will delete all the events recorded in the log and start on a fresh slate. You also get to choose whether or not to delete data the plugin has collected if it is uninstalled from your site.

WP Activity Log's pros and cons

To wrap up my WP Activity Log review, here's a brief overview of the plugin's pros and cons.

WP Activity Log's pros

• Its singular focus on keeping track of every site change makes it the undisputed champion amongst activity monitoring plugins. If you're looking for a plugin to keep you in the loop about everything happening on your website, you've found it.
• Even though WP Activity Log documents a massive amount of data, it is super easy to use, even for non-technical folks. Plus, it includes search and filter options. This is invaluable to help you quickly find the information you need without wading through irrelevant logs.
• Instead of keeping you in the loop about every change in the website, you can customize event tracking parameters. This way, you're only notified about the data points you wish to monitor.
• It is performance-optimized out of the box so despite its extensive activity logging, it won't slow down your site significantly. Also, its development team releases regular plugin updates to address new WordPress features and security concerns.
• It integrates well with third-party tools as well as popular security and management plugins. For example, Log Management Services such as Loggly, AWS Cloudwatch, Papertrail, etc.
• They offer a generous free plan. This makes it easy to set up top-notch site activity monitoring even with a limited budget.

WP Activity Log's cons

• WP Activity Log is a fantastic plugin with exceptional support — no cons have been seen yet.

Verdict of our WP Activity Log review: Does this plugin deliver?

Tracking user activity on your site is a sure way to keep users accountable. It also helps prevent unauthorized changes to your WordPress site. Not to mention, maintaining detailed reports of all activities on your site makes troubleshooting easier and is useful for compliance purposes.

WP Activity Log is a stellar choice as far as activity monitoring plugins go. It keeps in-depth logs of all actions, real-time alerts, detailed reports, comprehensive log data management options, and more.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that for a plugin that captures and records an enormous amount of data, WP Activity Log is simple to use. It includes a search box and filter dropdowns so you can search through the logs and use filters to whittle down the search results. And you can enable or disable specific logs and actions to fine-tune the log depth to your requirements.

Plus, their money-back guarantee enables you to try all its features risk-free for 30 days and decide if it fits your needs.

Get started with WP Activity Log and start keeping tabs on all activities on your WordPress site today — the easy way!