Check and restore articles

Sometimes an article that published perfectly stops looking right — a block disappears, or raw code shows up in the middle of the page. Article Health finds those articles and puts them back the way TMN wrote them.

Go to Too Much Niche → Article Health.

The Article Health page after a scan, with the health groups along the top

Why articles break

TMN articles are built from blocks, and each block keeps its text inside the block's own data. Some plugins — internal-linking tools especially — rewrite your post as plain text, and can accidentally write into that data. The block's text stops being readable, and WordPress shows raw code instead of the article.

This can happen without you touching anything. Plugins that run on a schedule change posts in the background, so an article can quietly break weeks after you published it.

Content Egg 21.8.0 and newer refuses any edit that would damage a block, so this stops happening once both plugins are up to date. Article Health is for the articles that were affected before that. The page needs that version too — if Content Egg is older, it will tell you.

Scan your site

Press Scan site. TMN checks every article it has generated and sorts them into four groups. The scan runs entirely on your own site, takes seconds, and doesn't use any of your monthly articles.

• Damaged — one or more blocks can no longer be read. The number next to it shows how much of the article is affected: the higher it is, the worse the damage.

• Healthy — every block is intact.

• Not scanned — TMN hasn't checked this one yet.

• No post — the WordPress post was deleted or moved to the trash, so there's nothing to restore into.

Click any group to filter the list. It's worth scanning again now and then, since a plugin running in the background can cause new damage at any time.

Restore an article

Tick the articles you want and press Restore selected. To take a whole group at once, use Select all matching — it picks up everything matching your current filter, across every page of the list.

TMN shows you what's about to happen, then fetches each article's original content from the generation server and puts it back.

Restoring costs nothing. It doesn't use a monthly article and it doesn't generate anything new — it's the copy TMN saved when the article was first written.

What restore changes

Only the article's content. Everything else is left exactly as it is:

• Title, permalink, publish date and author

• SEO title and description

• Categories, tags and comments

• Product data

So a restore repairs the article without undoing the work you've done around it.

Undoing a restore

Before changing anything, TMN saves the current version as a WordPress revision. If you don't like the result, open the article and use Revisions to go back. This works even on sites that have WordPress revisions switched off.

"Already matches the stored copy"

Often you'll restore an article and be told nothing needed changing. That's normal, and it's a good sign — the article on your site is identical to the one TMN wrote, so there was nothing to put back.

It also means you can press Restore again whenever you like. Articles that are already correct are skipped, so re-running never does any harm and never costs anything. If a restore is interrupted, just run it again to pick up where it stopped.

How long you have

TMN keeps each article's original content for six months after it was generated. The Expires column shows the date for each article, and the page warns you when any are within a month of it.

After that the copy is removed and the article can no longer be restored — so if something looks wrong, don't leave it too long.

Restoring puts the article back, but it won't stop whatever damaged it. Make sure Content Egg is up to date, and check the settings of any plugin that rewrites your posts automatically.