Audit Export is Now Available for WordPress

If you manage WordPress sites professionally, you know the routine. A new client engagement lands in your inbox, and before you can scope the work, you need answers: What plugins are installed? How many content types are in play? Who has admin access? Someone, somewhere, probably has a spreadsheet with some of this information. It might even be current.

Audit Export is now available as a WordPress plugin, bringing the same structured site auditing capabilities from the Drupal module to WordPress installations.

The plugin inspects plugins, themes, content types, taxonomies, menus, widgets, users, and roles, then turns all of that into exportable, script-friendly reports. You get consistent data you can pipe into dashboards, attach to project documentation, or feed into CI pipelines.

What Gets Audited

Out of the box, the plugin ships with eight audit types covering system configuration, content structure, and user management.

The Site Report audit captures PHP version, WordPress version, active theme, multisite status, debug mode, timezone, and SSL usage. The Plugins and Themes audits list installed extensions with version, status, and update availability. Content Types shows all meaningful post types with counts by status, filtering out system-only types like revision and oembed_cache to keep the signal high.

Taxonomies cover term counts, hierarchy, and post type associations. Menus report item counts, assigned locations, and last modified dates. Widgets show which widget areas exist and what's active in each. Users and Roles break down role assignments, capability counts, and key permissions.

All audits share a consistent structure (headers plus data rows), making them straightforward to export and process programmatically.

WP-CLI Integration

If you spend more time in terminals than in wp-admin, the plugin registers a full command namespace: wp audit-export. You get subcommands for listing audits, running them individually or all at once, exporting to CSV or JSON, managing cron schedules, and testing remote connections.

wp audit-export run --all
wp audit-export export plugins --format=json --file=plugins.json
wp audit-export cron status

These commands slot directly into deployment scripts, CI pipelines, or scheduled tasks on your host.

Scheduled Audits and Remote Posting

For ongoing visibility, the plugin hooks into WP-Cron so audits can run automatically on a configurable schedule. You can also enable remote posting to send structured JSON payloads to a central dashboard or monitoring system. Authentication supports none, Basic, or Bearer token depending on your endpoint requirements.

This makes it practical to install the plugin across dev, staging, and production environments (or across many client sites) and aggregate the data in one place.

Extending with Custom Audits

Like the Drupal module, Audit Export for WordPress uses an extensible architecture. You can create custom audit classes that target anything specific to your site or business rules: custom post types, third-party integrations, compliance checks, or operational metrics.

Custom audits extend the Audit_Export_Audit abstract class, implement prepare_data() and process_data() methods, and register with the audit manager. Once registered, your custom audit appears alongside the built-in ones in the admin UI, WP-CLI, cron processing, and remote posting. No extra wiring required.

class My_Custom_Audit extends Audit_Export_Audit {
    protected $label = 'My Custom Audit';
    protected $description = 'Audits custom functionality';
    protected $group = 'custom';
    
    public function prepare_data() {
        // Return array of items to process
    }
    
    public function process_data( $item ) {
        // Process individual item and return data row
    }
}

If you've built custom audits for the Drupal module, the pattern will feel familiar.

Same Concept, Different Platform

The WordPress plugin mirrors what the Drupal module provides: a way to get repeatable, structured insight into how a site is configured. Whether you're documenting a site before a migration, tracking changes during development, generating client reports, or feeding data into a centralized dashboard, the workflow is the same.

For teams managing both Drupal and WordPress sites, this means consistent auditing across platforms without maintaining entirely separate tooling.

Resources

• Audit Export on WordPress.org
• Audit Export for Drupal