Last issue was about owning your tools instead of renting them. This one is about owning your evidence — because the most expensive sentence in WordPress maintenance is "I'm not sure what changed."

Here's the pattern. Someone notices the site feels slow. You run PageSpeed Insights, it's worse than you remember, and now you're guessing. Was it the plugin updates three weeks ago? The new hero video? The chat widget marketing added? Nobody wrote any of it down, so the honest answer is that you'll spend half a day bisecting your own site to find out — or, more likely, you'll shrug and live with it.

The fix isn't a faster site. It's a record. Two records, actually, lined up against each other: what your speed was on each day, and what changed on each day.

This week's fix: install a change ledger

I built a free, open-source plugin for exactly this. It's called Aftercare, and it does two things at once.

First, it records your daily Core Web Vitals — p75 LCP, INP, CLS and TTFB — from the Chrome UX Report, which is real field data from actual Chrome visitors rather than a lab test. Optionally it also runs a ~2 KB real-user-monitoring beacon on a sample of your visits, aggregated on your own site with no external service involved.

Second, it keeps a change ledger in plain English: plugin, theme and core updates, activations, settings changes, publishes and new users, each with the person responsible. Not a raw log — sentences like "WP Rocket updated 3.15 to 3.16 by admin".

Then it connects them. You set a budget per metric. When a day's p75 goes over budget — or comes in 20% worse than your 28-day baseline — Aftercare opens an incident, emails you, and shows the raw timeline of every change from the 72 hours before the breach, right next to the vitals trend. "What happened?" gets a data-backed answer instead of a shrug. Incidents close themselves when the metric recovers.

Setup, in about five minutes

Install and activate the plugin.
Create a free Google API key with the Chrome UX Report API enabled.
Paste it into Aftercare → Settings. Add up to five extra tracked URLs and turn on real-user monitoring if you want it.
Press "Run daily checks now". Your first vitals data appears immediately, then updates every day.

It's private by design: no accounts, no phoning home, no third-party service. CrUX calls go straight from your server to Google, and RUM beacons post to your own REST API. There's a dashboard widget, a pass/warn/fail dot in the admin bar, native Site Health checks and WP-CLI commands if you like scripting. Uninstall removes everything unless you tell it to keep the data.

It's free and open source, and it lives here: Aftercare. There's a Pro tier for people running client sites — unlimited tracked URLs, 13 months of vitals history, cause attribution ranked by confidence, white-label client reports, Slack notifications — but the free version is the whole idea, not a demo of it.

Why this is the highest-leverage install on the list

Because it changes what you're able to argue about. Right now, "the site got slower" is a feeling, and feelings lose to "well, it looks fine on my machine". A dated record of your field vitals next to a dated record of your changes turns that into a fact with a cause attached — and a cause you can undo. [FILL: one line on a real regression you traced this way, e.g. a plugin update or a heavy image that cost you a second of LCP.]

Install it today and it starts being useful in a week, which is exactly when you'll wish you had installed it a week ago.

This issue lives in the archive, organised by topic. And the plugins page shows the repeatable workflows alongside the service work.

How we can work together

Reply with your site URL once Aftercare has a week of data and I'll read the first incident with you.