When you're running maintenance across several WordPress sites in sequence, a list view with text-only status doesn't make "which site is being processed now" or "which ones are already done" easy to spot at a glance. A client put it plainly: "Make it visually obvious in the list which sites are in maintenance and which are finished."
A colored border is the obvious move, but there are real choices to make. What colors? Where do we get the state from? When does the "done" mark go away? And — can we ship this without touching the backend? This post walks through those four calls and the minimal frontend-only implementation we landed on.
Color picking — "red flashing" was the first thing we ruled out
How do you make the running site stand out? The intuitive answer is "blinking red," but that got cut early. Multi-site maintenance runs are long. Having something blink red somewhere on screen the whole time is a fatigue source.
We went with "a gentle blue pulse + a solid green border" instead:
