Malcolm Peralty

Governance Guardrails is a file-based WordPress governance plugin for site owners, agencies, and managed WordPress teams that want important operational rules to live in code instead of scattered database settings.
You define a policy in a PHP configuration file. Governance Guardrails reads that file on each request and applies the configured rules. This makes the policy easy to review, version-control, and deploy consistently across environments or multiple sites.
Governance Guardrails can help you manage:
<ul>
<li>Feature toggles such as XML-RPC, comments, feeds, the Customizer, widgets, application passwords, user registration, WP-Cron, and related admin features.</li>
<li>Admin UI cleanup, including admin bar nodes, dashboard widgets, menu pages, and admin footer text.</li>
<li>Runtime capability denials by role without changing stored role definitions in the database.</li>
<li>Upload governance, including allowed MIME types and per-file size limits.</li>
<li>Content behavior such as revisions, autosave intervals, oEmbed, and emoji loading.</li>
<li>Login behavior such as password reset restrictions, generic login errors, and post-logout redirects.</li>
<li>HTTP security headers and other hardening options such as pingback removal, author archive handling, file editing restrictions, and staging noindex headers.</li>
<li>Head cleanup for RSD, WLW manifest, shortlinks, feed links, and REST API discovery links.</li>
<li>Locked options so selected <code>wp_options</code> values are pinned from code.</li>
<li>Custom governance callbacks for site-specific rules.</li>
</ul>
This plugin does not claim to secure a site by itself. It is intended as a governance and consistency tool that helps keep selected WordPress settings and behaviors aligned with your site’s operational policy.
<h4>Must-use plugin support</h4>
Governance Guardrails was originally built for must-use plugin deployment. It can still be installed that way by copying <code>governance-guardrails.php</code> and the <code>governance-guardrails/</code> directory into <code>wp-content/mu-plugins/</code>.
For WordPress.org installation, it can also be installed and activated as a normal plugin. In that case, the included sample config is used from the plugin directory unless you define a custom config path.
To use a custom config file, add this to <code>wp-config.php</code>:
<pre><code>define( 'GOVGUARD_CONFIG', '/absolute/path/to/governance-guardrails-config.php' );
</code></pre>
The shipped sample config lives at <code>governance-guardrails/governance-guardrails-config.php</code>.
Config loading is fail-open. If the config file is missing, unreadable, has a syntax error, or does not return an array, Governance Guardrails does not enforce governance rules and logs a warning instead of crashing the site.
<h4>WP-CLI</h4>
When WP-CLI is available, Governance Guardrails registers the <code>wp governance</code> command set.
Examples:
<ul>
<li><code>wp governance status</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance check</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance audit</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance audit --severity=high</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance diff</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance get features --format=json</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance mimes</code></li>
</ul>

Governance Guardrails

Governance Guardrails provides file-based rules for managing admin behavior, capabilities, uploads, and operational hardening from code.

kynatro

One of WordPress’ biggest bottlenecks is that it loads every single plugin that 
is active on your WordPress installation on every single post/page no matter 
whether they are needed for that post/page or not. This plugin will allow you 
to create simple rewrite rules to exclude a plugin or plugins from any URI 
pattern match. This is a great way to reduce the memory footprint, SQL queries 
run at page load, load times, and improve site response speed.
This is NOT a normal WordPress plugin, but an mu (must use) plugin and requires 
special installation instructions. Please see the <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-plugins" rel="ugc">installation section</a> for more 
information.
Requirements: PHP5+, WordPress 2.9.x+

Disable Plugins

Manage which plugins load on what page with simple regular expression pattern matches similar to an Apache .htaccess file

Governance Guardrails vs Disable Plugins