RevivePress review: what it changes on your site, read in its code

RevivePress, formerly WP Auto Republish, is a free WordPress plugin that resets old posts' publish date on a timer, so they return to the top of your blog and feeds. In the version wordpress.org serves, 1.5.8, each run changes that date and nothing else in the post. That version dates from December 2024, and three vulnerability databases, NVD, WPScan and Patchstack, list an issue in it with no fixed version. Unstale, the plugin this site sells, rewrites the post first, and then moves the publish date too, by default.

Disclosure: Unstale is this site's plugin; we sell its Pro version. We read both plugins' code and wordpress.org listings; we did not install either on a live site for this page. No link to RevivePress earns us anything.

What does RevivePress do to a post?

In RevivePress 1.5.8, the free version wordpress.org serves, each run changes two fields of one post: its publish date and the same date in GMT. Title, text, slug and status stay unchanged. The new date is the time the task runs, by default 30 seconds to one hour after the run. The first republish stores the original date, which later runs never overwrite. It can print that date before or after the post ("Originally posted on"), a setting that ships off.

Nothing runs until you tick "Enable Global Auto Republishing?" and save. The form then proposes a run every 5 minutes and posts older than 30 days. The free version republishes one post per run. The check runs when WordPress loads a page, front end or admin: no page load, no run. A republished post becomes eligible again once its new date passes that age, as its setting's description says, so the same posts come back in a loop. After each republish, it empties the object cache and the site-wide cache of 14 caching plugins. It keeps no log; its own code has no AI and makes no outgoing call.

The wordpress.org build contains no Premium code. Per its maker, Premium adds a posts-per-run setting, per-post and one-click republishing, social sharing, and OneSignal, WPML and Polylang support. On September 24, 2026, its pricing page listed Starter, for 1 site, at $29.99 for the first year or $89.99 once, as sale prices: "Annual renewals are full price." The free trial runs 7 days, with no card.

What RevivePress's new date does in WordPress, Yoast and Rank Math

What follows holds for any tool that moves the publish date, Unstale included.

WordPress sets a post's modified date to the current time on every save. After a RevivePress run, "published" and "modified" therefore fall at the same moment, for a text that did not change.

Yoast SEO 28.5 and Rank Math 1.0.279 then output the republish time as datePublished, which Google defines as "The date and time the article was first published". Yoast leaves out dateModified when the two dates match; Rank Math outputs it, equal to the republish time.

The lastmod in the sitemaps of WordPress, Yoast and Rank Math moves forward at each republish. Google says it uses lastmod if it is "consistently and verifiably" accurate.

The RSS feed lists the post at the top again, with the new pubDate and the same guid. If comments close automatically after a set number of days, WordPress counts from the publish date, so a redated post reopens them.

With dated permalinks, the address follows each new date unless you click "Fix Permalink Structure", which swaps WordPress's date tags for RevivePress's own, pinned to the original date. WordPress redirects the old dated address. On deactivation, RevivePress puts WordPress's tags back, and redated posts take their new date in the URL. What a moved address costs in Google, and what to check, is covered in our guide to republishing and rankings.

Whether a new date is worth it at all, and what Google has written about it, is in our guide to changing the publish date.

Is RevivePress still maintained, and is it safe?

RevivePress 1.5.8, released December 27, 2024, is its latest version, tested up to WordPress 6.7.9; WordPress is now at 7.1.2. On its support forum, the author last replied on February 10, 2023, and none of the 12 threads opened since has had a reply. Because of that tested-up-to version, wordpress.org shows the notice it puts on any plugin not tested with the last three major releases: it "may no longer be maintained or supported." Its author still maintains another plugin, WP Last Modified Info, updated in January 2026.

wordpress.org shows 4.6 out of 5 from 115 ratings. Of the eleven one- and two-star reviews, seven mention support that did not answer, all posted between 2021 and 2024.

RevivePress 1.5.8 bundles version 2.10.1 of Freemius, the library that runs its licensing. NVD, WPScan and Patchstack list a reflected cross-site scripting issue, CVE-2024-13362, for RevivePress up to 1.5.8, the current version, with no fixed version of the plugin; exploiting it means getting a user to click a crafted link. WPScan places it in Freemius versions below 2.11.0, and Freemius released 2.11.0 on February 9, 2025. Patchstack rates the issue low priority, "unlikely to be exploited" (published May 1, 2026). The forum thread asking for a patch, opened August 4, 2026, is one of the 12 without a reply. WPScan's entry is marked as not verified.

An earlier issue, CVE-2024-1844, which let a subscriber-level account change the plugin's settings, was fixed in version 1.5.6.1, according to WPScan.

RevivePress vs Unstale

Both plugins move the publish date. RevivePress moves nothing else. Unstale moves it after rewriting the post, by default, and also when its review screen shows no change to the text; one box in its settings turns that off. Unstale keeps the original date in the database and shows it nowhere on the post; RevivePress can print it on the post, with a setting that ships off.

The rest differs. RevivePress changes that date on a timer, at no cost per run. Unstale rewrites the text, checks the post's main claims on the live web and shows the change in a review queue by default; the site's AI provider bills each refresh.

One thing is the same: both have their own permalink tags pinned to the original date, and both put WordPress's tags back on deactivation, so a redated post then changes address.

Which one for which job

• Choose RevivePress if you only want old posts back at the top of your blog and feeds on a timer, with no change to the text and no AI bill, and you accept a version from December 2024 with the open advisory above.
• Choose Unstale if the text itself has aged, its figures, prices and years, and you want the post's main claims checked on the live web and the rewrite shown in a diff before it goes live. It needs WordPress 7.0 and an AI provider connected in WordPress, and that provider bills each refresh.
• Neither, if a date should move only when the text did: update by hand and show both dates, as our guide to refresh old WordPress posts explains.

Other date plugins, and those that rewrite, are compared in WordPress content refresh plugins.

Questions about RevivePress

Is RevivePress the same plugin as WP Auto Republish?

Yes. It used to be called WP Auto Republish, and its wordpress.org address still carries that name: wp-auto-republish. It is not Revive Social, which shares posts to social networks, nor Revive.so, a separate plugin; which Revive does what is answered in our guide to content refresh tools.

Does RevivePress work with WordPress 7?

Its wordpress.org listing says it was tested up to WordPress 6.7.9; WordPress is now at 7.1.2. Its code asks for WordPress 5.2 and PHP 7.3 or later. We did not install it, so we cannot say how it runs on 7.1.

How do I put the original publish dates back?

In the plugin's Tools tab, De-Schedule Posts sets the stored original date back on every republished post at once. Run it before Remove Post Meta & Actions, which deletes those stored dates without restoring them.

Can Unstale move the date without rewriting, like RevivePress?

No. Every Unstale refresh rewrites the post, Minimal level included; the date moves last, when the setting is on. For a date-only move on a timer, RevivePress does exactly that.

Google documentation quoted under CC BY 4.0.