Color-coded badge system helps track WordPress site maintenance staleness at a glance

A developer managing multiple WordPress sites built a visual badge system to display how many days have passed since each site's last maintenance. Prompted by a client request, the solution shifts from showing absolute dates to relative elapsed time paired with color-coded risk tiers: green for 0–14 days, gray for 15–29, amber for 30–59, and red for 60 or more days. The badges appear inline next to the last maintenance date and include a hover tooltip to reinforce the day count's meaning. To keep the code clean, day-calculation and color logic were consolidated into reusable helper functions rather than scattered across list and grid views. The implementation also addresses cross-browser date parsing quirks in Safari and guards against negative elapsed days caused by clock skew or future-dated entries.