Admin Watch Central

Description

Admin Watch Central gives WordPress administrators a clear view of who can make meaningful changes to a site. Review privileged-user access, recent logins, current sessions, password-change visibility, supported MFA status, Site Health, aggregated 404 activity and a lightweight Site Activity history. All Admin Watch Central screens require the existing WordPress manage_options capability.

Key Features

• Privileged-user access visibility for roles that can make meaningful website changes.
• Latest successful login visibility after installation.
• A dedicated, searchable and paginated Active Sessions screen for eligible users.
• Lightweight Site Activity for successful logins, explicit logouts, grouped failed logins, user creation/deletion, role and password changes, content changes, plugin/theme activity, WordPress core updates and Admin Watch Central settings changes.
• Site Activity category, user and date filters, search, pagination and a five-item Dashboard preview.
• Site Activity recording and failed-login switches, 7/30/90-day retention and a confirmed clear-log control.
• Observed password-change dates and local password-strength estimates.
• Supported MFA status visibility without collecting MFA secrets.
• Site Health summary with a link to WordPress’s native Site Health screen.
• Aggregated 404 monitoring with accurate daily and seven-day request totals.
• Privacy-conscious local operation with no telemetry, IP collection or password copies, and WordPress personal-data export/erasure integration.

404 request totals are maintained as small daily aggregates, so the Dashboard’s today and seven-day totals remain accurate without retaining individual requests.

Login and password-change metadata is recorded only after Admin Watch Central observes the relevant event. MFA status is available only for supported authentication providers and may show “Not detected” when status cannot be reliably determined. Active Session counts are read from current WordPress core session state for eligible users and are not stored by Admin Watch Central.

Site Activity begins when recording is enabled; existing login/password timestamps are not backfilled into history. It stores known event types, user IDs, object references, bounded labels, UTC timestamps and allow-listed metadata. Account names are resolved from current WordPress accounts rather than copied into history. Failed attempts can retain a bounded attempted username or email address and are counted in 15-minute buckets, with at most 100 named groups plus an unnamed overflow group per bucket. Oversized identifiers and identifiers that are literal IP addresses are not retained. Retention defaults to 30 days, accepts only 7, 30 or 90 days, and uses daily WordPress Cron cleanup. Disabling recording preserves retained history until cleanup, erasure or a confirmed clear operation.

Admin Watch Central does not create or store copies of passwords, password hashes or password history. Free does not collect, store, display, hash or anonymize IP addresses. It does not retain session tokens, session metadata, cookies, browser/device history, request bodies, content snapshots, MFA secrets, referrers or telemetry. There are no external services, alerts, session-control actions, exports/reports or redirect tools. WordPress’s native privacy tools can export and erase this plugin’s account metadata and retained activity linked to an account ID or its current failed-login username/email identifier, without deleting the account. Advanced monitoring, actions, policies, reports and extended retention remain separate Pro planning.

Site Activity is a lightweight operational history, not a forensic audit log. It observes supported native WordPress hooks; direct file/database changes, expired session cookies, revisions, autosaves and metadata-only content changes are not treated as activity. Current valid sessions do not indicate real-time online presence. Network-wide multisite management is not supported.