Audit areas

The six areas

Code

Reads theme and child theme files, Customizer Additional CSS, Elementor custom CSS and HTML widgets, and snippets from WPCode, Code Snippets, Simple Custom CSS and JS, Elementor Custom Code and Astra Custom Layouts. PHP is parsed into a syntax tree and read; nothing is executed. Finds PHP syntax errors, deprecated WordPress functions, code worth a second look, and records what each unit hooks into and loads. The optional parent theme comparison downloads the matching theme release from WordPress.org and shows which files differ.

Builder

Reads Elementor pages, templates, popups, Theme Builder conditions, global colors and fonts, and block editor content, block types and synced patterns. Finds templates, popups, globals and synced patterns nothing uses, templates that point at deleted templates, and header or footer templates that target the same pages.

Media

Records every attachment and every use of it: post content (including drafts), featured images, WooCommerce galleries, Elementor data, the site icon and logo, and custom CSS. Finds images over 2560 pixels or 1 MB, images shown without alt text, files nothing appears to use, and exact duplicates. A file can still be used from places Strata cannot see (theme options of some themes, hard-coded paths in PHP, emails, other sites), which is why unused files are called "likely unused". The Assets tab shows the library as a grid with a preview of each file, where it is used, and views for unused files, duplicates, oversized images and missing alt text.

Links and redirects

Crawls your own pages from the server (up to 500 on Free, one page or file at a time; no limit on Pro, several at once) and checks files such as images and PDFs with a quick HEAD request instead of downloading them. It also reads redirects from Redirection, Rank Math, Yoast SEO Premium and Safe Redirect Manager. Finds broken internal links and missing images, scripts and stylesheets with the page and widget that contain them, redirect chains, loops, redirects that end on a 404, and the same address redirected by two plugins. Sites behind a password or a firewall that blocks the server from calling itself skip the crawl; everything else still runs.

CSS

Reads every stylesheet and CSS block the Code area found and records the rules. Finds the same property set differently in several places for one selector. With Pro, also finds selectors that match nothing on up to 50 sampled pages.

Conflicts

Compares what the Code area found. Finds the same function defined twice, several sources setting one filter when only one result is used, a hook removed in one place and added in another, a tracking tag or library loaded twice, a script or stylesheet loaded in one place and removed in another, two snippets doing the same job, and CSS set differently in several places. Each one names the copy to keep and the copies to remove.

What depends on what

Some areas read the results of others. When you scan an area on its own, Strata adds what it depends on, so a Conflicts scan reads the code first.

Scanning one area at a time

Every row in the Audit areas section of the Overview has a Scan button, and the section title has Scan selected for the rows you ticked.

A partial scan refreshes only the areas it covers: every screen, export and PDF report shows the newest result for each area, and each Overview row says when its area was last scanned. Old scans are cleaned up automatically, but Strata always keeps the scans the current results come from. Scheduled scans (Pro) are always full scans.

While a scan runs

The header names the stage ("Reading code", "Checking links"), the count so far out of the total, and an estimate of the time left once the stage has processed at least ten items over thirty seconds. Pause stops the scan after the current step and keeps its place; Resume picks up where it stopped; Cancel ends it and keeps what was found. Scan events (started, paused, resumed, finished, cancelled, failed) are listed on the Activity screen next to the fixes.

Related: Fixes and undo Pro features