What is the mySites.guru snapshot and how often does it run?

The snapshot is an automated collection of over 140 best practice and security data points — covering PHP version, CMS configuration, user accounts, and more — run automatically twice a day and available on demand.

What is the difference between the snapshot and the audit in mySites.guru?

The snapshot completes in milliseconds by checking configuration and settings, while the audit performs a deeper inspection of every file and line of code in your webspace to find malware and hidden threats.

Can I fix issues found in the snapshot without leaving mySites.guru?

Yes — many snapshot checks include a quick toggle switch that applies the recommended fix to your site with a single click directly from the dashboard.

Quick Snapshot of All Your Sites

In this article we are going to describe the amazing and** unique snapshot **that is performed by mySites.guru twice a day, or on demand on your sites. The snapshot currently has over 140 data points collected within seconds!

While its not a photo of your site, it is a quick overview of hundreds of the best practice and security checks implemented - or not - on your site.

What exactly is the mySites.guru snapshot?

Within mySites.guru, where you can add UNLIMITED Joomla and WordPress sites to your account, you can see two main areas of “checks”

These are the Snapshot and the Audit tabs on the Manage Site Page.

The difference between the Snapshot and the Audit checks, is that the snapshot checks can be completed within milliseconds, whereas the audit has checks that require us to look at every single line of code in every single file in your webspace, this obviously takes more time.

Both features provide a huge list of best practice that is checked by the service, and highlights those areas you should concentrate on.

The Snapshot checks your platform (Joomla/WordPress) configuration, Writing Settings, Discussion Settings, User Accounts and Access, Plugins and Extensions, File Information, Database Integrity and Hosting Environment.

Each of the tools is displayed, showing the current status on your site, the trend (if its changed, increased or decreased) a Learn More button and either a quick toggle or link to the investigate page where you can investigate the reported issue and fix it.

Resolve problems with a single click!

Here is an example of just some of the Discussion Settings checks for WordPress:

Screenshot of mySites.guru feature Screenshot is old - sorry. Same features just a different look and feel in 2024 onwards

On the right you can see that these checks can be quickly resolved with the toggle switch - a single click and your site will then be following the best practice again!

Toggles Screenshot is old - sorry. Same features just a different look and feel in 2024 onwards

Automated. Twice Daily. And On Demand

Once a site is connected to mySites.guru, we will automatically refresh the snapshot data twice a day, and when you click “Take a new snapshot” button, this means you also have the very latest information at your fingertips in your mySites.guru account.

Huge number of checks, leading you to follow best practice!

The snapshot has a huge number of checks, that we consider to be the best practice for secure and optimized websites. You might not agree with some recommendations and that’s fine with us,

Here is just one small section of the Joomla Snapshot:

mySites.guru snapshot wordpress configuration

Of the whole page if you are interested (and have good eyesight!)

Manage.mysites.guru en sites manage p0MpGb anon1

And thats just SOME of the snapshot checks!

The snapshot powers other features too…

At the end of the snapshot, we gather a list of your Extensions/Plugins/Templates/Themes and we check each one of them for updates that might be available.

Depending on your settings you can ask that we do an Auto Upgrade these things, but more on that in another blog post …

We also use this opportunity to capture your Site version, PHP version etc.

Identifying hacks

The snapshots job is not to identify hacks - that is done in the audit - however there are checks in the snapshot that will uncover things to do with hacks - for example, mySites.guru features are pushed very very often, and when we see emerging trends we will add a new mySites.guru check for that. An example of this is in 2016, when there was a specific hack that created usernames with a pattern like Joomla.user.helper.XXXX

Now, you would probably not notice if one of your 1000s of users was called “Joomla.user.helper.XXXX but the mySites.guru snapshot would, and would show you this as a check for you to resolve manually

We have got your back on this!

Want to know more about the snapshot? Create your free account today!

BONUS - Screen Shots!

Some English speakers see the word snapshot and the camera icon and might think of photos rather than what we describe above.

As an added bonus, mySites.guru creates a snapshot (picture) of your home page for every site you add to mySites.guru! You can view these on a public URL (Disabled by default, here is our example), or within your account.

6dqj44 Example Screenshot of mySites.guru rendered by the mySites.guru service