The GuardPress WordPress Dashboard Widget
GuardPress adds a widget to the main WordPress Dashboard (the page you land on when you sign in) so every administrator sees the current security posture without having to navigate to GuardPress → Dashboard. This article covers what the widget shows, what the color states mean, and how the score maps to the letter grade on the full dashboard.
What the widget shows
The Dashboard Widget renders four data points per administrator:
- Security score as a large number with letter grade and color-coded status label (Protected / Needs Attention / At Risk)
- Active threats count from the malware scanner. This is unresolved detections, not historical.
- Critical vulnerabilities count from the vulnerability scanner. Only findings with severity critical are surfaced in the widget; lower-severity findings live on the full Vulnerability Scanner page.
- Last scan timestamp in human-relative format (“2 hours ago”) so you can tell at a glance whether the scheduled cron is actually running.
A one-click link at the bottom takes you to GuardPress → Dashboard for the full view.
Color-coded status
The widget’s status color is derived directly from the security score, using the same thresholds as the letter grade:
| Score | Grade | Color | Status label |
|---|---|---|---|
| 80–100 | A / B | Green | Protected |
| 60–79 | C / D | Orange | Needs Attention |
| Below 60 | F | Red | At Risk |
These thresholds are hard-coded so the widget and the full GuardPress → Dashboard page can never disagree about your score’s severity.
Who sees the widget
The widget renders for every user with the manage_options capability. In a standard WordPress install, that’s the Administrator role. Editors, Authors, and Subscribers do not see it. On multisite, network-admin users see it on the Network Admin Dashboard; subsite-level administrators see it on their own site’s Dashboard.
If the widget doesn’t appear for a user who should see it, check the Screen Options tab in the top-right of the Dashboard. WordPress remembers per-user widget visibility preferences, so a user may have previously hidden it.
Troubleshooting
Widget shows “Never” for last scan
Either the scheduled scan hasn’t run yet (activate the plugin, wait 24 hours, or trigger a manual scan) or WP-Cron isn’t firing. WP-Cron requires HTTP traffic to fire by default. Sites with very low traffic can miss scheduled scans for long stretches; the fix is to run cron from the system-level scheduler and set DISABLE_WP_CRON to true. Your host’s documentation will describe the exact setup.
Widget color doesn’t match the full dashboard
Shouldn’t happen since both use the same score. If it does, refresh both pages. The widget renders server-side on page load, so a stale tab shows a stale value. If the mismatch persists across fresh loads, open GuardPress → Audit Log and look for repeated errors from the score-calculation function; that indicates a broken factor input.
- Understanding the Security Dashboard: the full-page dashboard the widget links to, including score composition
- Quick Start: the 5-step walkthrough that gets the widget to green