Add a Site Health check for a non-virtual robots.txt file

[zodiac1978]

At WordCamp Nederland 2022 @joostdevalk held a talk about unnecessary bot traffic and how to prevent it.

One slide caught my interest:
​https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13Ngq-T2Qdbz1b8apUiioTCBmcsB5s411xBKcklmKyNQ/edit#slide=id.g152f65bfa26_0_87

Blocking those unneeded bots is easy in theory (there is a filter available to change the virtual robots.txt file), but is not easy to build, because we need to look at many use cases and edge cases.

For high traffic sites, it would be better to have a non-virtual robots.txt file, to prevent PHP/WordPress handling this.

But if we create a robots.txt file it is easily missed that now WordPress is not handling it anymore.

Therefore I suggest adding a check to Site Health if there is non-virtual robots.txt file in the root directory.

Maybe we could also add the content of this file in the info area and/or in the tools section of the plugin.

Happy to work on a patch if this idea gets confirmation.

[zodiac1978]

Maybe we could also add the content of this file in the info area and/or in the tools section of the plugin.

Since version 1.7.0 there is a robots.txt viewer in the Health Check plugin available:
​https://github.com/WordPress/health-check/commit/015347bc7cf1b5fb81281add0a7db5d4f7b5de66

Now I would like to add the according debug data.

[zodiac1978]

Adding a robots.txt check to the debug data in the Site Health feature

[zodiac1978]

Debug info if there is no pyhsical robots.txt file available

[zodiac1978]

Debug info if there is a pyhsical robots.txt file available

[zodiac1978]

Debug info as shown in the clipboard data