Why you Should Logout of the Wordpress Dashboard

In this guide we'll quickly discuss why you should log out of your WordPress admin dashboard when you are not using it. There can be multiple requests that your web-browser sends to the /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php script while you are logged into the WordPress admin dashboard, and leaving your computer unattended over the course of the day those requests can add up to a large amount of resource usage.

Knowing exactly what WordPress is doing when you're not at your computer is important to protect you from getting suspended.

Excessive requests for admin-ajax.php

By default the /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php script is mainly used by plugins so that they can continue sending information to the server from the admin dashboard, regardless of whether you are clicking on a link telling WordPress to do something.

In a lot of cases this is perfectly fine, as you might work on your WordPress site for a few hours and then move on to other things. However if you simply leave open the WordPress admin dashboard and don't close your web-browser and walk away from your computer and start doing other things, WordPress doesn't know this and so will continue to send in further requests to the server.

When you Edit pages and posts it uses admin-ajax.php

When editing a WordPress page or post in your dashboard the admin-ajax.php script is utilized to autosave any changes. So if you're making a whole lot of edits and leaving the admin dashboard open this can add up to a large amount of resource usage on a shared server.

Heavy admin-ajax.php usage plugins

There are several known WordPress plugins that use the /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php script extensively to function. A basic or Spark plan may not be sufficient if you are consistently using these plugins for long periods of time throughout the day:

• Secure WordPress
• Wordfence Security

We will be adding to this list as we discover more intensive plugins, please let us know about any other WordPress plugins you might have had resource usage issues with.

The best way to ensure these type of problems don't happen for you is being sure to logout of the WordPress admin dashboard, and to also close out your web-browser to be 100% sure that all requests from your computer to the server have ceased.