NIVA Guard
See and control every outgoing connection of your WordPress plugins and themes. Log each connection with its timing, block ads and promotional notices, cache license checks instead of cutting them off, skip unreachable hosts automatically, turn WP-Cron into a real server cron, and answer scanner pro
About this tool.
See and control every outgoing connection of your WordPress plugins and themes. Log each connection with its timing, block ads and promotional notices, cache license checks instead of cutting them off, skip unreachable hosts automatically, turn WP-Cron into a real server cron, and answer scanner probes with a fast static 404.
Many plugins and themes call home on every page load or in the dashboard: advertising feeds, news widgets, license checks, update checks, usage tracking. On a slow or filtered network (some hosting regions cannot reach many foreign servers at all) each of those calls can wait 5 to 15 seconds and slow down the whole site.
NIVA Guard shows which plugin connects to which address and how much time it costs, then lets you decide for each connection: leave it, block it, or (for licenses) cache the answer. Nothing is blocked by default: every switch is off until you turn it on.
Connections
- Logs every outgoing HTTP connection made through the WordPress HTTP API, with the caller (plugin or theme), the address, the context (site, admin, cron, AJAX, REST) and the time it took. Slow connections are highlighted.
- A built-in list of more than 50 known connections (advertising, news feeds, update checks, license checks, tracking), each with an explanation, a type and a separate switch. A “relevant to this site” tab lists only the ones that match the plugins and themes that are active on the site.
- Block a connection completely, or cache a license response for a few hours instead of cutting it off. Blocking a license or plugin-function connection shows a warning first.
- “Seen on your site” lists connections that are not in the built-in list, grouped by plugin or theme, so you can block or cache them too.
- Take a whole plugin offline: everything it sends out is closed except wordpress.org.
- Automatic circuit breaker: a host that fails or answers slowly several times in a row is skipped for a while, so an unreachable server no longer adds seconds to every page. License addresses and hosts you choose are exempt.
- Optional deep tracking of direct PHP connections ( file_get_contents( 'http…' ) , fopen ) and a static scan of plugin code for curl and fsockopen .
- Reports: counters (connections, total wait, blocked, served from cache), a downloadable text log and summary, and a list of the slowest connections.
