BackBurner Post Archiver

BackBurner Post Archiver quietly retires old content from the parts of your site where “latest” matters — the homepage, category and tag archives, search results, and your RSS feed — once it passes an age threshold you choose. Nothing is deleted. Anyone with a direct link, a bookmark, or an existing search ranking can still open an archived post exactly as before; it simply stops surfacing in listings of your newest content.

This is useful for sites that accumulate a lot of time-sensitive posts (news, deals, version-specific tutorials, event write-ups) where old items cluttering the homepage and archives hurts the reading experience, without wanting to actually remove any of that content or its SEO value.

Key features:

• Set a single site-wide age threshold (in months) after which content is archived
• Choose exactly which post types are included (Posts, Pages, Media, Products, and any other public custom post type)
• Restrict archiving to specific categories and/or tags, or run it site-wide
• Mark any individual post “Never auto-archive this post” to permanently exempt it, regardless of age
• Archived content is moved to a dedicated “Archived” status — never trashed or deleted
• Archived posts are automatically excluded from the homepage, category/tag archives, internal search, and the RSS feed
• Archived posts keep their original permalink and load normally (no redirects, no 404s) for anyone visiting directly
• Un-archive any post at any time from the normal status dropdown in the post editor
• Built-in Dry Run mode — preview exactly which posts would be archived before changing anything live
• Runs automatically once a day via WP-Cron, or on demand with a “Run now” button
• A master Enabled switch so the whole feature can be turned off instantly without losing your configuration
• Clear “Last run” status shown right on the settings screen

Recommended workflow

1. Install and activate the plugin — it does nothing until you turn it on.
2. Use Dry Run first, ideally scoped to a single small category, to see exactly what the plugin would archive.
3. Review the Dry Run results and mark any posts that should never be archived.
4. When you’re confident, turn off Dry Run for a normal, real run.