WordPress error reporting made easy with Raygun!

I’m super pleased to announce the immediate availability of our Raygun WordPress Plugin! If you’re building a business on WordPress then integrating Raygun could save you a lot of time, money and stress!

Install the plugin

The WordPress plugin is already live in the WordPress plugin gallery. Simply go to your WordPress admin panel, load up the Plugins page, click Add New, search for ‘Raygun4WP’ and you’ll see it there. Hit install and you’re good to go – just follow the on screen instructions.

Note that you will need a raygun account. Sign up for a free trial here, create a new application as prompted after signup – use the API key provided in the admin section of the WordPress plugin.

A 2 minute video on getting started

Some times seeing a video of getting started is best:

Prepare yourself to be shocked!

I’ve personally been testing out the Raygun plugin for WordPress on my blog. I installed it thinking I wouldn’t see too many errors — I’d only just set up the blog and made a couple of posts.

Immediately I started getting error notifications in Raygun about my personal blog!

15 minutes later I had 53 errors!

What the heck? I don’t even get 53 visitors a day on there. This didn’t make any sense. So I took look at the errors that Raygun had reported.

You know what I learned? Many plugin builders for WordPress are not the world’s best coders. In particular, a top rated Google Sitemaps generator with millions of installs was having errors everywhere. Not basic errors either – massive site-breaking bugs that resulted in huge inefficiencies.

WordPress itself wasn’t causing me any issues, but various plugins were incredibly buggy with no visible signs of problems. I’ve since switched some of the plugins – I don’t want buggy code on my blog hurting my SEO, user experience or stability of my site.

Why WordPress error reporting?

Why build specialised support for WordPress? Several reasons:

1. WordPress is so much more than a blogging platform

Many businesses run their entire online presence on WordPress these days. Complex CMS’s, commerce sites and much more. Software problems can cost those businesses significant losses.

2. We can do more than when using our PHP provider

It’s true – Raygun works great with any PHP site, but with a specialised WordPress plugin we can provide integration directly into the Administration site, making it super easy to configure without touching any code.

The plugin even includes automatic 404 reporting – so you immediately know when a user’s lost, or you’re missing some content. Knowing about it lets you fix the source of the errors, increasing user engagement and cutting your exit rate!

Raygun4WP also has the Raygun Dashboard baked in to Admin panel – so you never need to leave your WordPress site when viewing its health.

3. You just can’t trust code quality

A huge strength of the WordPress platform is the strength of the community: thousands of plugins to do just about anything. Not many people then read the code of those plugins to see that they’re well written. Raygun can provide you insight into the code quality to make sure you’re not getting burnt by a bad plugin.

Dive in, the water’s fine!

Getting Raygun setup to report your errors is easy – no development skills required at all. We would love to have you on board and tell us how you find Raygun for WordPress.

Click here to sign up for a free Raygun trial and then post a comment with how you find it!