What changed in each release

The sidebar previously showed counts only — for example Inbound 3 · Outbound 4. Each count now expands to show which posts link to the page you are editing and which pages it links out to, paginated.

Seeing the posts that already link here is editorial context while you write.

Editor sidebar

The suggested anchor is pre-filled and editable in the suggestion card. One-click insert is unchanged if you leave the text as-is — editing is opt-in.

Editor sidebar

Link Pulse detects pages that look functional rather than editorial — checkout, cart, account, privacy policy, pages that are little more than a shortcode — and proposes them with a stated reason.

Nothing is ever excluded automatically. You review each suggestion and decide. That matters on sites running directory, membership, or e-commerce plugins, where a fresh install would otherwise suggest links to Login and Checkout.

Context bank

Columns sort ascending and descending across the entire result set, not just the visible page, and every row is reachable through pagination.

Reports

The Suggestions accepted and Suggestions dismissed cards switch the table to the suggestions themselves — source page, target page, anchor text, status, and date.

Reports

The dashboard shows which phase is running and how far through it is while link counts are still being calculated.

Link Pulse keeps a record of which pages link to which, updated as content is indexed. Recalculating is a database lookup rather than a full site re-scan.

On a thousand-post benchmark the recalculation phase dropped from roughly 2.3 seconds to under 0.02, and the whole update from about 2.7 seconds to 1.8.

How ranking works

After updating to 1.1, Link Pulse recalculates link data once in the background. Link counts and the orphan and underlinked reports may look out of date until that finishes — several minutes on a large site.

Showing stale figures plainly is better than showing zeros that look real. No action is required while it runs.

Installation

Titles, excerpts, headings, body text, taxonomy terms, slugs, hierarchy, and inbound and outbound internal link counts are stored in your own database.

Requires WordPress 6.6 or later and PHP 7.4 or later. Free indexes posts and pages; custom post types are planned for Pro.

Installation guide

Drafts, private, password-protected, trashed, and auto-draft content are excluded, along with revisions, menus, and attachments.

First-run site index, manual reindexing, and scheduled reindexing at hourly, twice-daily, or daily intervals.

Hourly health checks and metrics rollups; daily cleanup.

wp link-pulse run-queue and wp link-pulse queue-status.

Taxonomy overlap 0.30, title overlap 0.20, body keyword overlap 0.15, heading overlap 0.10, link graph relevance 0.10, excerpt overlap 0.05, custom field overlap 0.05, priority score 0.05.

Every suggestion shows its score and the signals that produced it.

How ranking works

A signal your site does not use is dropped from the denominator rather than permanently capping every score. A post lacking a signal your site does use takes a real zero instead of having that weight pushed onto title matching.

How ranking works

Beginning above eight inbound internal links and capped at 0.35, so targets that are already heavily linked rank lower.

How ranking works

Ranking is deterministic. Identical content and settings always yield the same match score.

How ranking works

Built from WordPress's own components. Block editor only — the classic editor is not supported in this release.

The sidebar shows index freshness and the current post's inbound and outbound internal link counts.

Each suggestion shows its match score and the signals that produced it.

Anchor text is generated from target titles and matched phrases. You confirm or choose before insertion.

Insert a suggestion in one click. Dismissals persist.

The sidebar surfaces clear loading, ready, empty, and error states rather than failing quietly.

Controls which post types are indexed and which content is excluded — individual posts and pages, categories, and tags.

Context bank

Excluded content is never offered as a link target, receives no suggestions when edited, and is omitted from the reports entirely.

Context bank

Index-only mode on Free. Unlimited fields and broader modes are planned for Pro.

Orphan and underlinked inbound thresholds are configurable in settings.

The two flags are disjoint; orphan takes precedence. Reports identify structural gaps — they do not predict ranking outcomes.

Reports

Covers index control, context bank, reports, logs, monitoring, and alerts.

Capabilities for dashboard access, settings management, running the index, and viewing logs, so access can be granted without granting manage_options.

Schema changes ship as migrations on your own WordPress database.

Keep everything, keep settings only, keep logs only, or delete everything. Stored secrets are removed first regardless of the policy chosen.

Uninstall and data

Per-site activation is supported. Network activation on multisite is detected and refused rather than failing quietly.

Installation

Indexing and ranking run entirely on your own install.