When you maintain a number of WordPress sites, showing the "last maintenance date" in the site list is the obvious move. A column of dates like 2026-05-21. But in actual use, that alone falls short.
A client put it well: "Besides the last maintenance date, it'd help to also show how many days have passed. And it'd be even better if the color changed at 15 / 30 / 60 days so I can see the risk level." This post walks through that step — from "absolute date" to "relative elapsed days + color" — including the small design details.
Why a date alone isn't enough
An absolute date like 2026-05-21 is precise, but it pushes the "difference from today" calculation onto the user's head. Fine for five sites; as the managed set grows, reading "which ones are getting neglected" off a column of dates gets hard.
The point of a maintenance inventory is to grasp which sites need attention at a glance. If so, what you should surface is less the absolute date and more the relative quantity — "how many days since the last maintenance" — and ideally let color convey "how many days until it's risky." The client's request landed exactly on this "absolute → relative + risk" shift.
