The 54+ automated checks

How the checks are organised

Mission Control runs 7 check classes once a day in the background, plus on demand from the dashboard. Each class contributes several sub-checks. The plugin ships 54+ sub-checks in total — the precise current count is 62.

Performance (11 sub-checks)

1. Persistent object cache — detects whether Redis, Memcached, or an equivalent is active.
2. Time to First Byte (TTFB) — graded good (< 0.6s), warning (< 1.2s), or poor.
3. Large homepage images — flags any local image above 250 KB.
4. Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) — via PageSpeed Insights; cached 6 hours.
5. Total page size — warns above 2 MB, fails above 3 MB.
6. HTTP request count — warns above 50, fails above 100.
7. Render-blocking resources — flags head scripts without async/defer.
8. Page caching plugin detection — recognises 11 common caching plugins.
9. Browser cache headers — inspects Cache-Control, Expires, ETag, Last-Modified.
10. CDN detection — Cloudflare, CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, jsDelivr, unpkg, cdnjs.
11. Lazy loading — native and plugin-based, with coverage percentage.

Security (7 sub-checks)

1. Plugin updates available — flags any active plugin with an update available. Honest framing: this is an update-available indicator, not a CVE feed.
2. Theme updates available — same heuristic for the active theme.
3. Security headers — X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options, Strict-Transport-Security, Content-Security-Policy.
4. File permissions — wp-config.php, .htaccess, and the uploads directory.
5. SSL certificate — issuer, validity, days until expiration (warns at ≤ 30 days).
6. Mixed content — scans the homepage for http:// resources.
7. HTTPS redirect — verifies HTTP redirects to HTTPS with a 301.

SEO (13 sub-checks)

1. Discourage search engines flag.
2. Missing meta descriptions (Yoast and Rank Math aware).
3. Thin content (under 300 words) plus empty category descriptions.
4. Readability — average words, sentence length, simplified Flesch score.
5. Keyword density — top 10 terms across the 10 most recent posts.
6. Heading structure — missing or duplicate H1.
7. XML sitemap accessibility and validity.
8. robots.txt — existence, sitemap reference, blocking issues.
9. Permalink structure — fails on the default ?p=123.
10. Duplicate content — duplicate titles and meta descriptions.
11. Missing image alt text — with affected pages listed.
12. Broken external links — sampled from your recent posts.
13. Canonical URLs — verifies homepage canonical and a managing plugin.

Store Integrity (14 sub-checks)

1. Missing price.
2. Missing featured image.
3. Out of stock.
4. Missing short description.
5. Missing long description.
6. Uncategorised products.
7. Products without tags.
8. Missing product gallery (fewer than 3 gallery images).
9. Duplicate SKUs across products and variations.
10. Variable products without variations.
11. Low stock — enriched with 30-day sales velocity and days until stock-out.
12. Oversold products — negative stock joined with unfulfilled orders.
13. Negative stock products — separate data-integrity view.
14. Backorder items — current backorders with quantity and notify flag.

Orders & Payments (5 sub-checks)

1. Failed orders — 7-day and 30-day counts, top failure reasons, top gateways, trend.
2. Pending orders — total plus any stuck longer than 7 days.
3. Payment gateway status — active gateways, test mode, missing SSL.
4. Abandoned cart rate — detects 5 abandoned-cart plugins.
5. Refund rate — 30-day rate, count, total, and top 5 refunded products.

Environment (4 sub-checks)

1. PHP version (warns below 8.0, fails below 7.4).
2. WordPress version vs latest core.
3. WooCommerce version vs latest WooCommerce.
4. Autoloaded options size (warns above 1 MB, fails above 3 MB).

Database (8 sub-checks, always on)

1. Database size and the 10 largest tables.
2. Expired transients — count and total size.
3. Post revisions — count and approximate size.
4. Spam and trashed comments.
5. Orphaned postmeta.
6. Orphaned term relationships.
7. Orphaned usermeta.
8. Database fragmentation — tables over 10% fragmentation.