Strata Site AuditInstall
From the WordPress admin, go to Plugins, Add New, and search for "Strata Site Audit". Install and activate it. Strata appears in the admin menu as Strata. If you bought Pro, download the Pro zip from your Freemius account instead and upload it under Plugins, Add New, Upload Plugin; it installs over the free edition and keeps every setting.
On activation Strata creates its own database tables and nothing else: no front-end code, no cron jobs until you start a scan, no requests to outside servers unless you opt in (see what leaves the site).
Run the first scan
Open Strata and click Run first scan. The first scan is a full scan of every audit area. It runs in the background in short steps, so you can close the tab; a scan started from the Strata screen moves a little faster while that screen stays open. The header shows which stage is running, how far it is and roughly how long is left once it has seen enough items to estimate.
How long it takes depends on the site. The link check requests your own pages from the server, one page or file at a time on Free and several at once on Pro, so on a site with a few hundred pages it is a matter of minutes; on a large Elementor site with thousands of documents a full scan can take an hour or more. You can pause, resume or cancel at any time. If a scan is slow, see slow scans.
Read the Overview
The Overview answers "how is this site doing, and what do I do first".
- Site health. One score from 0 to 100 for the whole site, with a word (Healthy, Fair, Needs attention) and one sentence on what needs attention. Beside it, a row for each area (Content, Code, CSS, Links, Conflicts) with its own score and counts; select a row to open its issues.
- Do this next. The five most important issues, ranked by severity and then by how many places they affect, each with what to do and its fix button.
- Audit areas. One row per area with when it was last scanned and what is open. Each row has its own Scan button; tick several and use Scan selected, or Select all. See Audit areas.
- Sources read. A disclosure listing every source Strata looked at (theme files, Customizer CSS, snippet plugins, Elementor, the block editor, the media library, the crawler) and whether it was read or skipped, with the reason.
The tabs along the top are Overview, Issues (every issue in one list, filtered by area, severity or text), Assets (the media library as a grid, plus templates, widgets, globals and patterns), Links, Code (with CSS and Conflicts as sub-tabs), Activity (every fix and every scan) and Settings. Each tab shows its count of open issues, colored by the worst one. The Report button in the header exports a CSV, and on Pro a PDF.
Apply a fix
Select an issue to open it. Every issue says what is wrong, what to do in numbered steps, and where it lives; for a conflict it marks which copy to keep and which to remove. If a safe fix exists, its button is in the steps: Replace link, Disable snippet, Collapse chain, Move to trash and so on. Every fix saves what it replaces first, and the change appears on the Activity screen with an Undo button and a note on when undo expires, if it does (items moved to the trash can be restored until WordPress empties the trash, 30 days by default). Strata never edits theme files and never deletes anything permanently on its own; Assets > Trash deletes trashed files for good only when you ask. See Fixes and undo for each fix.
Install Pro and activate a licence
After checkout, download the Pro zip from your Freemius account or from the link in the plugin, and upload it under Plugins, Add New, Upload Plugin. WordPress offers to replace the current plugin; accept. Your settings, scans and history stay. Then open Strata, Account, and click Activate License if it is not already active. If Pro features disappear after you re-upload the plugin later, see troubleshooting.
If a licence lapses, Strata keeps working as the free edition and your history and settings are kept for when you renew.