One drawback of what we have outlined here is that these tests execute during every WordPress page request. If you have written a long series of tests, they may incur some significant overhead and they can really slow down your site performance. One option is to move all your tests into a separate file that you must navigate to directly.
Perhaps you have heard of a "health check" page—all it does is run a series of tests, and if everything looks good, it prints out an "Ok" message. There are many different monitoring applications out there (for example, Nagios—http://nagios.org/) that can be configured to take quick looks at these health check pages and verify that they are seeing the "Ok" message. If a test hits a snag, it will generate and error, and the monitoring software will notice it.
To set up a health check page, you can remove all the tests from your loader.php
file and construct a new file like the following:
<?php // Sample Health Check page require_once( realpath...