IntellectSight Stale Content Scanner

Most “old content” tools only look at one number: the date a post was last modified. That misses the real problem. A post edited last week can still say “Best Laptops for 2023”, and a post from five years ago can be perfectly evergreen.

IntellectSight Stale Content Scanner reads the content itself and flags the specific sentences that make a page look abandoned, so editors know exactly what to fix.

What it finds

• Old years in titles — “Top 10 Tips 2018”, “Best Laptops for 2023”. Year ranges such as “2019–2026” and history titles such as “The 2008 financial crisis” are left alone.
• Dated year references in the text — “as of 2023”, “best picks for 2024”, “2022 pricing guide”.
• Events, offers and deadlines that already happened — “The conference will be held on March 14, 2025”, “Early-bird tickets valid until February 2025”. A date is only flagged when it was still in the future when the post was written and is in the past now, so historical dates (“founded on March 3, 2010”) are not reported.
• Time-sensitive phrases in old content — “this year”, “upcoming”, “currently”, “the latest version” in posts that have not been touched for a year (the phrase list and the age are both editable).
• Leftover shortcodes — [contact-form-7 id="12"] and similar tags from plugins you removed, which visitors now see as raw text.
• Orphaned blocks — blocks such as acme/slider whose plugin is no longer active.
• Links to unpublished content — internal links pointing at drafts, private posts or trashed pages.
• Long-untouched content — nothing edited or reviewed for a configurable number of months.

What editors can do with it

• Freshness score (0–100) for every post and page, with Stale / Needs attention / Fresh bands.
• Report screen — a work queue sorted by worst score, filterable by content type and by issue, with search, bulk actions and CSV export.
• Editor sidebar box — every finding with the exact sentence it came from, right next to the content you are editing.
• Mark as reviewed — record who checked a post, when, and an optional note (“prices checked”), without changing the post’s public modified date. A full review history is kept per post.
• “Not an issue” — dismiss a single finding; it stays dismissed on later scans.
• Snooze — hide a post from the queue for 30 days.
• Freshness column in the Posts and Pages lists, and a dashboard widget with the five posts most in need of a refresh.
• Weekly email digest (optional) listing the worst offenders with direct edit links.
• Public “Last reviewed on … by …” line (optional, off by default) and the [isscs_last_reviewed] shortcode.
• schema.org lastReviewed and reviewedBy structured data for reviewed content (optional, off by default).
• WP-CLI: wp stale-content scan and wp stale-content report.

Built to be light

• Everything runs on your own server. The plugin never contacts any external service.
• New and updated posts are scanned when saved. A small batch of older results is refreshed once a day, and a full scan runs in small AJAX batches so it never times out on large sites.
• Results are stored as post meta — no custom tables.
• Uninstalling removes every option, scheduled event and piece of post meta the plugin created.

Developed by IntellectSight.