The Republish Old Posts Pro plugin, inspired by the now defunct and no longer available Old Post Promoter, helps revive old posts by resetting the publish date to the current date.This will push old posts to your front page, the top of archive pages, and back into RSS feeds.
Why would you want to do this? Here are a few reasons:
- New visitors to your site haven't seen your old content. This will help them discover it.
- Old content won't show up in date-based searches on search engines, but resetting the date can make them look fresh again.
- People like to share and link to new content and they determine that by looking at the publication date.
This ideal for sites with a large repository of evergreen content.
WARNING: DON'T USE THIS PLUGIN IF YOUR PERMALINKS INCLUDE DATES
Tips
This plugin is straight-forward to use, but I have a few recommendations:
- Consider republishing content that is at least 90 days old. You don't want to upset current users by making them see things they'll remember they've seen before.
- A randomness interval can make the republishing seem more natural. Not mandatory, but those with tinfoil hats may appreciate this feature.
- The frequency of republishing should depend on how much content you have. The more you have, the more frequently you can republish without running into a situation where you run out of old content.
- Review your posts for those that shouldn't be republished. This includes those that are date specific, not really content (like forms), are that just aren't worth republishing. Filter these by category or using the custom field available in the pro version.
Pro Version
The pro version of this plugin has a number of features worth pointing out. These features include:
- Additional minimum intervals: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 days, 3 days, and 7 days.
- Additional randomness intervals: 12 hours and 24 hours.
- Additional post age options: 120 days, 240 days, 365 days, 730 days.
- Ability to filter out any posts of your choosing so that they are never republished. This provides more fine-grained control than just selecting a category.
- Choosing whether a random post or the oldest post that otherwise meets the criteria should be republished.