The Site Health check from the WordPress Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin are a common way to check the configuration of your WordPress site and point out configuration issues. Some of these tips are useful and not all of them can be applied easily on InfinityFree. This article covers some commonly seen issues with the Site Health checks.
The optional module, imagick, is not installed, or has been disabled
imagick is a PHP extension that can be used to edit images in PHP applications. It makes use of the very powerful ImageMagick library under the hood.
If enabled, WordPress will use imagick to manage images in the media library.
InfinityFree doesn’t include the imagick extension with free hosting, and it cannot be enabled. Advanced media manipulation often requires a lot of server power, which we simply cannot provide for free. Additionally, ImageMagick, and the underlying software, is often considered to not be designed with security in mind, and we don’t want to run the risk of running vulnerable software on free hosting servers.
If WordPress cannot use imagick, it will fall back to using the GD extension to manipulate images. The GD extension has less features than imagick, but the features available are sufficient for most sites. The GD extension is enabled by default on all free hosting accounts, and can be used by WordPress.
So Site Health will warn you that the optional imagick extension is missing. But this is not an error, because imagick isn’t required, and this limitation will not affect most websites.
If your site does really need imagick for some specific feature, please know that the extension is available on premium hosting.
Your site could not complete a loopback request
Some plugins and themes will try to connect back to your website like a visitor, often to scan the content of your website to check for things like configuration issues.
This does not work on InfinityFree. Websites on InfinityFree use a security system that blocks automated access to websites hosted here. This also affects WordPress trying to access it’s own website. Connections like that may result in a 403 Forbidden response, or receiving the HTML code for the security challenge.
Cloudflare can be used to bypass this security for connections from remote sites, but connections from InfinityFree website servers always connect directly to our servers, and do not check the publicly configured DNS settings of your domain.
The REST API encountered an unexpected result
Please see the section “Your site could not complete a loopback request”, the same issue prevents WordPress from interacting with it’s own REST API.
Your website does not use HTTPS
Nowadays it’s recommended that all websites always use secure HTTPS connections. But to use HTTPS, you need to have an SSL certificate installed on your hosting. InfinityFree does not install any SSL certificate by default, but does provide the tools to configure your website with HTTPS for free:
Unable to detect the presence of page cache
This error will always fire due to the limitation described in the “Your site could not complete a loopback request” section, regardless of whether you actually have page cache installed.
Having page cache is still recommended on our hosting. There are plenty of choices for good WordPress plugins that can provide page cache functionality. Popular plugins such as W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache can be very helpful.
Please note that InfinityFree servers do not come with any additional features to help with caching. Free hosting doesn’t use LiteSpeed or Varnish web servers, and doesn’t offer cache databases such as Redis or Memcached. Using plugins that rely on such features are not recommended. Any caching plugin you choose must be optimized to use file based cache.