UsageRay – See Where Plugins Are Used

Know what depends on a plugin before you turn it off.

UsageRay is a read-only plugin usage and dependency auditor for WordPress administrators, developers, agencies, and maintenance teams. It answers a practical maintenance question: what could this plugin still support? UsageRay gathers evidence from content and background systems, explains why each result was attributed, and links to matching content when WordPress provides an edit screen.

Audit your entire plugin stack

Run one site-wide audit to review every installed plugin from a single dashboard. UsageRay scans shared content and storage in bounded batches instead of repeating the same work for each plugin, then prioritizes confirmed dependencies, stored footprints, incomplete coverage, manual review, and cleanup candidates. You can monitor progress, cancel safely, resume after a page reload, search the results, filter by evidence status, expand the supporting details, and export the completed audit as CSV or JSON.

Record a shared Keep, Investigate, or Removal reviewed decision with a short handoff note for each plugin. Review-progress cards and a safety-prioritized queue show what still needs attention. Select several audited plugins to apply one confirmed decision or export a focused CSV or JSON handoff report. UsageRay marks a saved decision as needing re-review when the plugin version or its health classification changes. These records document administrator judgment only; they never deactivate or delete a plugin, and “Removal reviewed” is not a guarantee of safety.

Keep audit history current

Scheduled site-wide audits are optional and off by default. An administrator can choose Daily or Weekly from the Scan History card. UsageRay uses WordPress cron, prevents overlapping scheduled runs, continues large audits in bounded steps, and shows the next run, progress, completion, or failure status. It makes no external scheduling or tracking request and saves only the same compact, privacy-safe history summary as a manual site-wide audit.

Review before deactivation

UsageRay adds a Find usage action to the Installed Plugins screen. For active plugins, Deactivation Preflight places an evidence and risk review before the normal WordPress deactivation action. It also adds Review deactivation with UsageRay to the bulk-action menu so several selected plugins can be reviewed together, including declared plugin dependency warnings.

Opening a scan or preflight never deactivates anything. Deactivation requires a separate explicit confirmation and is then handled by WordPress’s normal protected workflow.

Plan a plugin replacement from evidence

The Migration Workspace lets an administrator choose a source plugin and a possible replacement, then captures a protected read-only inventory of the source plugin’s supported evidence. The baseline is created with the same resumable bounded scanner, belongs only to the administrator who created it, expires after 90 days, and can be explicitly deleted.

UsageRay classifies each baseline component as Ready to map, Manual review, No known replacement, or Already clear, with an explanation and the original evidence locations. Ready to map appears only when an exact maintained planning rule identifies a comparable replacement component. It is not a compatibility promise: UsageRay does not copy content, modify settings, or deactivate either plugin. Administrators must use supported vendor tools and verify every result.

Each item also has a private administrator checklist. Mark it Pending, Migrated, Intentionally retired, or Blocked, and save an optional handoff note. Checklist progress belongs to the administrator who created the workspace and is deleted with that workspace. A checklist status records human judgment only; it does not prove compatibility or modify the site.

Evidence instead of false certainty

UsageRay separates visible dependency evidence, stored footprint, and uncertainty. An old option, metadata key, empty custom table, or inactive widget is useful cleanup evidence, but it is not treated as proof that the plugin is currently active on the site.

An inactive plugin becomes a cleanup candidate only when UsageRay can attribute supported components and finds neither visible usage nor stored footprint. A candidate still requires manual confirmation. No visible evidence never means safe to delete. Background, security, caching, backup, SEO, and integration plugins may leave no supported content evidence.

What UsageRay checks

• Individual plugin deactivation links, with a cautious High, Medium, or Unknown preflight assessment.
• Selected-plugin bulk preflights, with separate risks, combined evidence, and declared Requires Plugins relationships.
• Gutenberg blocks declared or registered by the selected plugin.
• Shortcodes registered by the selected plugin or declared literally in its source.
• Active legacy widgets registered by the selected plugin.
• Attributable legacy widget options, classified as active, inactive, or orphaned instances without exposing their settings.
• Content stored in custom post types declared literally by the selected plugin.
• Reusable blocks, Site Editor templates and template parts containing detected blocks or shortcodes.
• Classic and block navigation records that reference attributed custom post types.
• Recurring and one-time WordPress cron events attributed through registered callbacks or conservative literal scheduling calls. Event arguments are never displayed or exported.
• Custom database tables attributed through maintained mappings or conservative literal creation patterns. UsageRay checks existence and COUNT(*) only; row and column values are never read or exported.
• Conservative references in the active child and parent themes for attributed blocks, shortcodes, custom post types, and plugin-owned function calls. Only relative filenames and line numbers are retained.
• Plugin-associated post metadata keys and generic option names. Generic option values are never read.
• Versioned adapter signals for Elementor, WooCommerce, ACF, Contact Form 7, WPForms, Gravity Forms, Formidable Forms, Ninja Forms, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, The Events Calendar, Redirection, UpdraftPlus, LiteSpeed Cache, Wordfence, and WP Super Cache.

Transparent scan coverage

Every focused scan, site-wide audit, and Deactivation Preflight includes a Scan Coverage manifest. It distinguishes checked surfaces from surfaces that were not applicable, are not yet supported, failed, or were only partially inspected because of a safety limit. This makes the result’s limitations visible instead of implying complete detection.

Privacy-conscious and read-only

UsageRay does not modify content, delete plugins, or silently deactivate anything. Generic option values, post metadata values, scheduled-event arguments, custom-table row values, theme source text, and absolute filesystem paths are not retained in results or exports.

Use UsageRay when cleaning up an inherited site, replacing a form or page-builder plugin, preparing a client maintenance report, or investigating whether an installed extension still supports content or background behavior.

Use UsageRay from WP-CLI

Developers, agencies, and automation systems can run the same read-only audit engine without opening wp-admin. Use wp usageray audit to inspect the installed plugin stack or wp usageray inspect <plugin> for one plugin by slug or complete basename. List retained audits with wp usageray history list, compare previous with latest, or export a retained audit without rescanning content. Commands support concise tables and privacy-safe JSON or CSV output. Machine-readable formats include stable schema identifiers, automatically suppress interactive progress, and can use optional --fail-on policies for CI. Exit code 2 means a requested policy matched after successful output; operational failures remain exit code 1.

See UsageRay in action

Watch the short UsageRay overview:

The video narration is AI-generated.