Profiles

security monitoring, open source, indie SaaS, AI visibility, helping small WordPress agencies sleep at night

I ran a UK WordPress agency for over five years. We delivered around 500+ client sites, and the recurring nightmare was the “help, my site is showing Japanese characters in Google” email. Usually three weeks after a plugin nobody had updated since 2022. The fix was always the same drill: SSH in, find the injected PHP in /uploads/, find the rogue admin user nobody invited, restore from backup, apologise, lose a Saturday.

After the fifth Saturday, I built a small scanner that ran within the WordPress install and emailed me the moment anything looked off – a new admin, a modified core file, a foreign-language post, or debug mode left on in production. It saved my weekends. That tool is the seed of this plugin.

It later grew into Uptrue.io – a monitoring suite that covers the inside of a WordPress install (this plugin: file scans, rogue users, brute force detection, foreign-language injection) plus the outside (uptime, SSL, DNS, blacklists, AI search engine citations). I open-sourced the inside-the-install half because every WordPress site I’ve ever touched would benefit from it, whether the owner ever pays for the dashboard or just wants the free monthly email.