Let me start by saying that WordPress is great and the new Gutenberg update is awesome. WordPress 5.0 has literally changed the way we create new content. Unfortunately, making changes to the already published content is still a pain when you are dealing with more than 1 change. The problem is that we can’t save drafts as we update old content but instead we are forced to publish each change immediately. Luckily we have plugins to save the day!
How to draft changes to a published post/page in WordPress?
- Download Revision Master TMC plugin and activate it
Download the plugin directly from the WordPress plugins manager or download Revision Master TMC from WP Plugin directory.
- Go to your post listings, find the article you want to revise and click on the “Create Revision Draft” button
This will create a new replica of the published post/page. You can save drafts as you would normally do and when it’s time to publish the changes hit the publish button. This new page will now replace the old one while preserving the original published date, URL slug and other custom fields.
Revisionize by Jamie Chong is also similar to TMC plugin but Revisionize hasn’t been updated for Gutenberg. A WordPress revision plugin like TMC or Revisionize can also be used to allow moderators to approve changes made by contributors before publishing them.
Things to Keep in Mind when Republishing Old Content
- To avoid SEO issues it should be ensured that the post permalinks don’t change once the modifications are published.
- Revision Manager TMC will republish the post/page with the old date and not the current date. If you need to change it you can manually do that in the WP editor.
- Ask Google to recrawl the page from the Webmaster console.