The Content Audit Report plugin is a custom tool that scans the site for pages and posts with content that hasn’t been updated in 6 months, and is considered “stale”. Site users will receive an emailed report from the plugin periodically that catalogs the content which needs to be updated or generally addressed across all of the sites they currently or previously had access to edit. That email includes basic data about what the audit generated for them, a CSV file for that data, and a link to an page in WordPress where they can view and interact with the data. Site Administrators will receive an additional CSV file with the data for all stale content across the site. If a user is the Lead Site Administrator, they receive an additional report of all stale pages for all users across that site. For the purposes of the audit, users which last edited a page or post will receive “ownership” of that page/post until it’s updated by another site user.
Viewing the Content Audit Report through the dashboard
A listing of stale pages can be reviewed through the plugin’s interface. To view this interface:
- Go to the Dashboard menu
- Select “Stale Content Audit Report”
- Select the Page or Document report to view the information you need to review.
- In the drop-down menu at the top of the page, choose the name of the site you would like to view the information for.*
*If a user is the lead administrator of a site, a red Admin tag appears next to the site name in the drop-down.
The pages table for every user includes three actions per page:
- Delete the page – moving it to the WordPress trash
- Hide the page from future audits
- Edit the page.
The data can be exported as a CSV file, if needed.
Page Report
This report is a list of all pages that the user authored in their website that are over 6 months old. Please review these pages and either update them or delete them if they are no longer needed or relevant. You can also mute pages that hold evergreen content that you want to keep but don’t want to be reminded about. The lead administrator for the website will have an expanded report to all stale content regardless of what they authored.
Columns
- Post Title: Click on the title of the page/post to quickly edit it and make needed updates.
- Post Status: This displays the status of the page to help you determine if it’s published or a draft.
- Last Updated: This is the date this page was last updated.
- Author: This is website user that originally created the page. This is not an indication of a user’s current ability to access or to edit the website.
- Actions: Click on the “Hide” button to hide the page from the report in the future, or the “Delete” button to delete the page. Deleting a page will send it to the trash and it can be restored at a later time.
Document Report
This feature gives you access to the list of non-image documents in your Media Library and an easy way to determine where they are linked.
When reviewing documents you have the ability to sort each column in ascending or descending order, “View Related Posts”, and attest that the document meets accessibility standards for that file type. You can also use the search bar above the Document title column to filter through the documents if the list is long and finding a particular file is difficult.
Report Columns
- Document title: Click on the title of the document to see the Media Library settings for this file.
- Type: This indicates the file type for the document such as: docx, xlsx, pdf, etc…
- Last Updated: This is the date this file was last updated in the WordPress Media Library.
- Author: This is website user that originally uploaded this file into the Media Library. This is not an indication of a user’s current ability to access or to edit the website.
- Appears on: Click on the “View Related Posts” button to see a list of the pages or posts, this file is used on either as an image or linked. You can click on the name of the page/post in the results window to quickly edit the content if needed.
- Actions: After reviewing your document for accessibility, you can come to this area of the report to “attest” that the file does meet accessibility standards. Select the “Attest” button, and review the information on the screen before clicking the “I attest this document is accessible” button. Once the button is clicked, your username, date and time are recorded for record keeping purposes.
Attesting to a document’s accessibility
When attesting to a document, you are confirming all of the following for that document:
- This document conforms to current WCAG AA 2.1standards for accessibility.
- You are personally responsible for ensuring this document meets all applicable accessibility requirements.
Downloading reports
Information from the Page or Document reports can be downloaded by clicking one of the links at the top of the Content Audit Results screen. A CSV of the report will download to your downloads folder. If you are a site admin for any site in the audit, you will see two additional download links. These will hold information about users on your sites.
- Stale Page Report: This report contains your stale content on the website on pages you’ve authored.
- Admin Stale Page Report: This will download a report of all users across any site you’re a site admin of that has stale pages.
- Document Report: This will download a full list of the non-image documents on your site that have not been confirmed as accessible.
- Admin Document Report: This will download a report for all users across any site you’re a site admin of that has unattested documents.