Getting started with SteadyScore
SteadyScore by SteadyPress is a WordPress plugin that grades every plugin installed on your site for maintenance health, security history, support responsiveness, compatibility, install base, and author reputation. It rolls those signals into a single 0–100 score and a plain-language risk tier (Trusted, Acceptable, Caution, Warning, Critical) so you can see which dependencies are healthy and which need attention.
Who SteadyScore is for
- Site owners who want a defensible answer to "is this plugin still safe to keep installed."
- Agencies auditing inherited sites before a redesign, migration, or maintenance handoff.
- Maintenance plans and freelancers who need a repeatable monthly or quarterly plugin review without combing the WordPress.org directory by hand.
- Security-conscious teams who want vulnerability data and a record of when a plugin author last shipped an update, surfaced alongside the rest of a plugin's risk profile.
SteadyScore does not modify, update, or remove plugins for you. It reads the plugins you already have installed, fetches public metadata, scores each one, and surfaces what it found.
Free vs Pro at a glance
| Capability | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Local scoring for plugins on the WordPress.org directory (Path 1) | Yes | Yes |
| Premium-plugin scoring via free-version proxy mapping (Path 2) | Yes | Yes |
| Dashboard with sorting, filtering, and CSV export | Yes | Yes |
| Detail slide-over with full factor breakdown | Yes | Yes |
| Optional Wordfence Intelligence vulnerability lookups (you supply the key) | Yes | Yes |
| Background refresh via Action Scheduler | Yes | Yes |
| Commercial-plugin scoring for CodeCanyon and Envato (Path 3) | — | Yes |
| Enriched scoring via the SteadyPress API for plugins with no public data (Path 4) | — | Yes |
| Source-code analysis for custom and unknown plugins (Path 5) | — | Yes |
| AI-generated recommendations on what to do about low-scoring plugins | — | Yes |
| Scheduled monitoring with email alerts on score drops, new vulnerabilities, and removed plugins | — | Yes |
| Google Sheets export | — | Yes |
| License activation, site-limit management, and account portal | — | Yes |
The free tier is fully functional on its own. Pro extends coverage to plugins that are not on the WordPress.org directory and adds monitoring, AI analysis, and exports.
Five-minute quickstart
- Install the free plugin from the WordPress.org plugin directory. Search for SteadyScore by SteadyPress under Plugins → Add New, or upload
steadyscore.zipfrom the SteadyPress site under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. - Activate SteadyScore. A top-level SteadyScore item appears in the WordPress admin menu (you can move it under Plugins later in Settings).
- Open the dashboard. SteadyScore detects every plugin on your site and queues an initial scoring run via Action Scheduler. The dashboard shows a progress indicator while scores populate; depending on how many plugins you have installed, the first pass typically completes in one to five minutes.
- Review your scores. Sort by Score (ascending) to see your weakest plugins first. Click any row to open the detail slide-over and view the six-factor breakdown, the data source, and the link to the plugin's WordPress.org listing.
- (Optional) Add a Wordfence Intelligence API key under Settings → Vulnerability Data to include CVE history in your scores. Wordfence offers free Intelligence keys at wordfence.com. No vulnerability lookups run until a key is saved.
That is the entire free flow. From there you can export your audit as CSV, dig into individual plugins via the detail panel, or upgrade to Pro to bring commercial plugins, monitoring, and AI recommendations into the same view.
Where to go next
- Installation — full install paths, system requirements, and install-time troubleshooting.
- Using SteadyScore — how to read the dashboard, what each score factor measures, and how refresh works.
- Pro features — what unlocks with a Pro license and how activation works.
- Settings reference — every tab and every field.
- FAQ — answers to the questions prospects and customers ask most often.
- Troubleshooting — fixes for the issues users hit most often.
Need more help? Contact support.