Skip to main content

Getting started

1. Install and activate​

Install PlugUpp Search & Social Appearance Audit from the WordPress.org plugin directory (Plugins > Add New), or upload the ZIP under Plugins > Add New > Upload, then activate it. A new Appearance Audit menu appears in the WordPress admin sidebar, beneath Appearance.

2. Run your first scan​

Open Appearance Audit. Until your first scan has finished, the Dashboard opens with a setup row of one step, Scan your site, in place of the scan summary.

The setup row on the Appearance Audit Dashboard

Click Scan now in the step. The plugin renders each of your pages the way a visitor's browser would, reads the metadata that actually ships, and records the results. A progress bar shows how far it has got. You can leave the page - the scan continues in the background. When the scan finishes, the Dashboard reloads by itself: the setup row is gone and the scan summary and your results take its place. To change what is audited first, open Settings.

The free plugin audits all of your pages and posts, plus your archive pages - the blog home, category, tag and custom taxonomy archives, and monthly date archives (they have their own titles, descriptions and social tags, and they rank and get shared like any other page). It also reads your site's robots.txt once per scan for the AI access panel. Paid plans add custom post types and WooCommerce products, scheduled scans, and more.

3. Review the results​

Results are shown on three tabs:

  • Search Appearance - each page as a Google-style mobile result (breadcrumb, title, description and an indicative thumbnail), with the Issues badge alongside and any Warning, Notice and Robots flags on the card.
  • Social Appearance - each page as a social share-card preview (image, title, description) plus the X (Twitter) card type.
  • Findings - every page with something flagged, with its area, a one-line summary, and separate Issues, Warnings and Notices counts so you can triage without opening each one.

The Findings tab also carries one row that is not a page: Site: AI access and robots.txt. Its AI access badge opens a panel showing which documented AI crawlers your robots.txt allows or blocks, and what each provider documents that rule as controlling. See AI readiness.

Hover any preview for the full text. Click a preview image to open it full size with the area each platform keeps highlighted and the cropped edges dimmed. Click any badge - or any row on the Findings tab - to open the details popup, which shows each problem with the exact evidence from the rendered page and quick actions (view, edit, re-scan, and ignore).

See Reviewing your results for the full tour of the previews, the crop overlay, the issue-details popup and everything the audit flags, and AI readiness for the AI access panel and the AI findings.

4. Fine-tune what gets audited​

The PlugUpp Search & Social Appearance Audit settings page

  • Exclude pages you do not need to audit - from the row actions, the Exclusions screen, or in bulk from the standard Posts and Pages screens. Paid plans can also auto-exclude pages by rule. See Excluding content.
  • Ignore an individual issue (on one page or sitewide) from the issue details popup; it stays visible but stops counting.
  • Settings lets you choose what is audited (content types and archive pages; custom post types and unpublished content on paid plans), configure scheduled scans and email reports (paid), and set the description preview lengths. The preview lengths are under Previews, the last group, which stays folded until you open it. If you have changed a length, the group opens by itself and its heading says how many settings are changed. The Logs tab has the log level, Keep entries for (how long log entries are kept, 30 days unless you change it), the log viewer and the Share settings usage switch. The log is kept in your WordPress database.

Private and password-protected content is skipped automatically - it can never appear in search or social, so there is nothing to audit.