Understanding the Status System: Green, Yellow, Red and Neutral

Every finding in a report has a colour. This guide explains what green, yellow, red and neutral actually mean, and how to prioritise them.

An InspectWP report doesn't just list facts about your website, it also rates each one. The rating is shown as a coloured indicator next to every field. There are exactly four possible states. Understanding them is the fastest way to get value out of any report. If you haven't read the structural overview yet, start with Understanding your first report.

1. The four states at a glance

🟢 Green: Success
Everything is fine. The check passed, no action required.
Examples: a current WordPress version, a valid and trusted SSL certificate, a meaningful meta description, security headers correctly set.
🟡 Yellow: Warning
Worth knowing about, but not urgent. There's room for improvement, no acute problem.
Examples: the recommended security plugin is installed but not on its latest version; a privacy-relevant external resource without a clear risk; an SEO field present but not optimal (too short, too long, generic).
🔴 Red: Danger
An actual problem. Fix soon.
Examples: insecure HTTP resources on an HTTPS page (mixed content), an outdated WordPress major version with known vulnerabilities, a publicly reachable debug.log, a missing or expired SSL certificate.
⚪ Grey: Neutral
Pure information. No rating, neither good nor bad. Just a fact.
Examples: whether the install is a multisite, the IDs of detected tag managers, the cookie list, the detected hoster.

2. How to prioritise a report

If you do nothing else, follow this order:

  1. Red first. These are real issues that affect security, privacy or reachability of your site.
  2. Yellow next. These are cleanup tasks that improve your site without being urgent.
  3. Grey for context. Skim the grey fields to understand your site, but don't treat them as a to-do list.
  4. Green only as a sanity check. Skim them once to confirm nothing critical regressed compared to a previous crawl.
Tip: If you run automatic reports, every new report is a chance to compare against the previous one. A field that changed from green to yellow or red is the most interesting signal.

3. Why is a field empty or grey?

Not every check produces a rating. Some fields are purely informational by design (for example the cookie list, there's no „good“ or „bad“ amount of cookies in absolute terms). Others stay empty because the underlying data wasn't found, e.g. there's no JSON-LD on the page at all. An empty field is not an error. To see where each field lives in the report, check Understanding your first report.

4. Frequently asked questions

Most thresholds are absolute (e.g. „WordPress version is current“), but a few are context-dependent (e.g. „cache plugin recommended“ depends on detected workload). Two sites can therefore receive different ratings for the same field even when their setup looks similar at first sight.

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