How to run WordPress Activity Reports

WP Activity Log comes with a Reports module that includes WordPress Activity Reports. Here you can run a number of different reports on data in your activity log. Activity reports make it easier to view activity log data in a contextual manner, helping you get the data you need faster in a format that makes it easy to read.

In this guide, we will go through the basics of the Activity Reports, helping you get up and running in no time at all.

What are activity reports?

Reports are a staple feature of WP Activity Log. They can be used to generate any type of custom WordPress activity report from your audit trail and export it to a variety of file formats. You can also configure settings to automatically generate daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly summary reports that are sent to any email address you specify.

Generating your own WordPress activity reports

To generate a report, first navigate to WP Activity Log from the WordPress side menu and then click on Reports. From here, you can generate any type of report, such as a report about the activity of a specific IP address, user or users, role, or site in the case of a multisite installation. You can also specify a date range for the report.

Example of how to generate a WordPress Activity Report

To better help you understand how reports work, we will illustrate this with an example following a commonly-run report. We will create an HTML report to see the activity of the user Ruby on site1.wpauditlog.com for the months of February and March.

Step 1: Select the type of report

Navigate to the Generate & configure tab and:

• In the By Site(s) option, specify the site’s name, for example, site1.wpauditlog.com. Note: you only need to specify the site name if you use WP Activity Log on a multisite network
• In the By User(s) option, specify the user for which you would like to create the report. We will enter the name Ruby

In this example, we will ignore the remaining options since we would like to see all of the events generated by the user.

Step 2: Select the Date Range

If you want to generate a report for a specific time frame, specify the Start Date and End Date from the calendar drop-down options. In this example, we will specify the 1st of January 2022 as a start date. The end date will be set to the 15th February 2022.

Step 3: Select Report Format

You can export the report in HTML, CSV, or JSON formats. In our case, we are creating an HTML report, hence will be selecting the HTML option.

CSV and JSON are more commonly used for automatically parsing data, making them ideal formats to export to should you wish to import them into a 3rd party system.

Step 4: Generate the report

Once we’ve made all of our selections, all that’s left to do is to click the Generate Report Now button. The report will be automatically created and downloaded to your computer. Below is a preview of the report.

Once a report is run, a copy will be kept under Saved reports for 30 days, after which it is automatically deleted.

Now that you’ve successfully created your first report, why not learn how to automate them to receive them directly in your inbox at your chosen frequency. Refer to the how to schedule periodic WordPress reports guide to learn more.

WP Activity Log also offers WordPress statistics reports designed to easily generate statistical reports. To learn more about this, kindly refer to How to run WordPress Statistics Reports.