As bloggers, we all have down times. Work, family matters, writer’s block, anything could be the reason. It would really be awesome if there’s was something that updates our blogs for us when we can’t. Content Recycler does just that.
Well, sort of.
This plugin recycles your old posts, so they show up on the blog page as if you just published them.
For this reason, I developed a plugin for WordPress that if enabled, will make sure that your blog homepage does not stay static. This wouldn’t solve the problem by updating your posts with new content.
That would be cheating.
Instead, Content Recycler checks if you haven’t posted anything in a while. The plugin then updates the oldest post’s publish date effectively reusing content.
Why Content Recycler?
This kind of functionality is useful if you go on a vacation or simply become too busy to update your site. Making sure that your blog page, usually the homepage, is always fresh from the SEO and users’ point of view.
This strategy is very effective if you have a significant amount of posts already.
Affiliate marketers could also benefit from this functionality. Aside from the SEO and blog page freshness, Content Recycler puts the old affiliate links back to the front. Effectively recycling content and your possible sale.
The same goes for bloggers who have hundreds or even thousands of posts. In this case, the newer posts bury the read-worthy ones deep below them.
Content Recycler Features
The threshold time can be configured to be as low as one hour. For really active websites that want to appear to still be active during writer downtimes. PHP’s max integer value is the upper limit but I’ll just say eternity.
Although, the recommended value is between 24 – 72 hours.
But it’s really up to you.
An option to recycle nonhierarchical custom post types is also provided, in case that functionality is required. A hopefully useful manual Recycle Now button is also provided.
Finally, posts can be skipped by the recycling process if you provide their post IDs or slugs.
Pro Tip: Using my other WordPress plugin, Easy Content Templates, in conjunction with Content Recycler, sets you up a website that is always fresh and has content with a consistent format.
Download and Use Content Recycler
You can download Content Recycler from the WordPress Plugin Repository. Feel free to check the code out in Github.
As always, if you have any questions, suggestions, or feature requests, let me know in the comments section below or send me a message.