LynBro Plugins
/ Activity Log
LynBro Plugins
/ Activity Log
Every activity log answers “what changed before it broke”. This one also answers the question that comes with a letter from a regulator: what does this site record about people, and when does it delete it? There is a screen that says so in plain words, and a retention window that actually does it.
Free forever. No account, no card, no quota. Makes no request about your site to anybody.
days by default — then the entry is deleted, in batches, by a job you can also run by hand.
It records who did what, from which address, at what time. So secrets are masked before the row is written, addresses can be kept in full, shortened or not at all, the retention window really deletes, and removing the plugin drops the table. Nothing here needs explaining away.
Entries are stored as machine codes and turned into words when you read them. A change recorded while a Danish colleague was signed in still reads correctly on an English screen. That sounds like a detail until you inherit a journal in a language you do not speak.
Every filter on screen is backed by an index, the export walks by primary key instead of paging deeper and deeper, and the daily clean-up deletes in batches rather than locking a big table. Measured at a hundred thousand entries: first page under a millisecond, worst-case search about fifty.
No "Pro" tier, no nag screens. The features other plugins paywall are here from day one.
Who got in, who did not, from where, and which account somebody was going after.
Created, edited, published, trashed, deleted — and which fields moved. Autosaves and revisions are never recorded.
The ones a person would recognise by default — site address, who may register, default role, theme, language, mail — with an everything mode when you are chasing something specific.
Installed, updated, activated, switched off, deleted. The group that answers what changed four minutes before the white screen.
A new administrator appearing at three in the morning is the most useful row a journal ever holds, so it is marked as needing attention.
Recorded by comparing the file before and after, so a refused save is never written down as a change that happened.
Six months by default, anything from a day to ten years. Runs daily in batches; you can run it by hand and watch the number drop.
Record them in full, shorten them so they no longer point at one household, or do not record them at all.
Spam refusals and sign-in lockouts from the other LynBro plugins join the same list, so you see the sequence rather than three separate logs. Neither plugin is required.
The market leader’s free edition, and what WordPress records on its own. Checked against WP Activity Log’s own directory listing on 9 September 2026, where reporting and exports are named as premium features.
| Feature | Lynbro Activity Log | WP Activity Log (free) | WordPress on its own |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sign-ins, and the ones that failed | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Posts, pages and custom types | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Settings changes | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Plugins, themes and core updates | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Accounts and role changes | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Edits in the built-in file editor | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| A retention window you set yourself | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Filtered CSV export | ✓ | — | — |
| JSON export | ✓ | — | — |
| No premium edition to upgrade to | ✓ | — | — |
No. Recording happens on actions an administrator takes, not on visitor page views. Somebody reading an article never touches the plugin.
A busy site writing a thousand entries a day keeps around 180,000 rows at the default six-month window — a few tens of megabytes. The summary screen shows the current size, and there is an optional cap for small hosting.
Yes — anybody who can administer a site can also empty its journal. What the plugin does is make the act visible: emptying it is written down as the first entry of the new one, marked as needing attention. A stronger guarantee needs the log to live somewhere the site cannot reach.
No. It records administrative activity, not traffic. Popular pages are analytics, and that is a different plugin.
Yes. There is a list of account names to ignore, which is exactly what it is for: a deploy user touching two hundred files at a time turns a useful journal into noise.
The table is dropped and the settings are removed. There is nothing left behind to explain to anybody.