Detect, Export, and Delete Static Orphan Pages

Ever wonder how congruent your Static Live site is with your WordPress site?

If you use the Headless Hostman properly (by clicking the Delete on Headless as you’re tidying up), there should never be a difference.

But, some edge cases might emerge and you wouldn’t be a lone.

Even while testing our own site for this product, we realized there were stray pages that we never knew were Live.

What Causes Orphaned Static Pages?

It could be any number of situations:

1. You “draft” something, but never “Delete from Headless” or “Trash” (we auto-detect trash and then delete from Static).
2. You use our Custom Functions, but don’t pair them with Delete from Headless Custom Functions
3. You use some sort of Plugin that unpublishes or tidies up posts
4. You turn off an entire Custom Post Type, or deactivate a Plugin responsible for Posts
5. You migrate a new version of your site in, with radically different content

Get Full Visibility into Orphans

With our new Orphaned Static Pages tool, you can see what’s going on.

Located conveniently within the Diagnostics portal (scroll all the way down), this tool:

1. Detects pages on your Static Live site, but not “Published” on your WordPress site
2. Allows you to mass delete them
3. And allows you to export them to a CSV

If There Are Orphans, You’ll See Them

• And you can view them on your live site by clicking the Live URL

Why Export to a CSV?

If you have a boat load of these, you’ll want to set up redirects so you don’t create a ton of 404s at once.

Export to CSV allows you to pull those down and begin setting up a Bulk 301 import.

What Does Delete All Do?

Just like it sounds. It deletes all of the Orphans from your Static Live site bringing you back into congruence.

How We Track These

We run a job every 24 hours (because some sites might have a lot) to look for Orphaned pages on your Static Live site.

We compare every published page URL on your WordPress site against the active branch on the Static Live Site

At the moment, we’re skipping the wp-content and wp-includes folders because images are a whole different beast.

Version Availability

This functionality will be available to all current users during the next syndication.

However it is not available on AWS at this time.