WP Doctor: the WP-CLI command vs. the WordPress care service
If you searched "WP Doctor," you were looking for one of two completely different things. Here's both, honestly, including which one you probably want.
wp doctor — the command
wp doctor is a diagnostic package for WP-CLI, the official WordPress command-line interface. It runs a configurable series of checks against a WordPress installation and reports each as success, warning or error.
It's free, open source, MIT licensed, maintained by the WP-CLI project, and installed with wp package install. It runs checks for core update status, plugin health, cron counts, autoload option size, suspicious code, and file integrity against official checksums — and you can define your own in a doctor.yml file.
Use it if you're a developer or sysadmin with terminal access, managing one or many installs, and you want machine-readable output you can pipe into monitoring.
Official documentation: the WP-CLI handbook and the wp-cli/doctor-command repository. Not us. We don't maintain it and we won't pretend to.
WP Doctor — the service (us)
We're a Canadian WordPress care service operated by Novium Systems. We diagnose, repair, secure, speed up and maintain WordPress sites for businesses that would rather not learn what autoload-options-size means.
We use wp doctor — it's part of our diagnostic battery. It's roughly one input among many in a Health Report, alongside field Core Web Vitals, security posture, backup verification and the Canadian compliance checks no command-line tool performs.
Use us if you own a business, own a website, and want someone accountable for it.
Which do you want?
| If you… | You want |
|---|---|
| Have terminal access and a WP-CLI install | The command |
| Manage 50 sites and want automated health output | The command, plus a monitoring layer |
| Want to know why your site is slow, and then have it fixed | Us |
| Were told your site is hacked | Us — start triage |
| Need to know if your site meets PIPEDA or Law 25 | Us — no CLI tool checks this |
| Are a developer who wants a second opinion on a client site | Honestly? Both. Run the command, then buy the report |
One more thing worth knowing
There was also a WordPress plugin called "WP Doctor" in the plugin directory. It was closed in September 2018 following a security issue, its reviews report it shipped with a malware signature, and it hasn't been updated in years. It is not us, we have no connection to it, and you should not install it if you find a copy mirrored somewhere.
We mention it because it still ranks, and because you deserve to know before you go looking.