My WordPress Toolkit: The 4 Plugins I Built to Run 12 Content Sites

When you manage one WordPress site, the admin panel is fine. When you manage twelve, it breaks down. Not technically — WordPress works. But the manual processes don't scale. Checking 1,000+ articles for broken shortcodes. Adding internal links between related posts across categories. Making sure every article has a featured image, proper meta description, and optimized alt text.

I spent months doing these tasks by hand. Then I spent a few weeks building tools to do them for me. The tools turned out to be useful enough that I released them as WordPress plugins. Here's what they do and why I built each one.

ScanMyPosts — Content Auditing

The problem: I couldn't see what was broken across my sites without opening every post individually.

My content pruning strategy requires knowing which articles are thin, which have broken shortcodes from deactivated plugins, which are missing featured images, and which have dead external links. On a 100-post site, checking all of this manually takes an entire day.

ScanMyPosts runs 7 different scans from a single dashboard: thin content, broken shortcodes, external links, images, empty posts, shortcode inventory, and HTML tag search. Each scan returns results with direct edit links so you can fix issues immediately.

I covered how I use each scan type in my complete content audit guide.

Free vs Pro: The free version handles all 7 scan types with up to 20 results each. Pro ($29/year) removes the limit, adds CSV export, email reports, scheduled scans, and the ability to check external links and images for 404 errors.

Always Visible Pin It Button — Pinterest Traffic

The problem: Most Pin It button plugins only show the button on hover, which means mobile users (60%+ of traffic) never see it.

Pinterest drives meaningful traffic to my visual content sites — pet care guides, gift recommendations, and home decor content. But I noticed the pin rate was terrible on mobile. I checked, and sure enough, the Pin It button was hover-only. Mobile users literally couldn't see it.

Always Visible Pin It Button keeps the button visible at all times, on all devices. It's smart about which images get the button — only content images above a minimum size, not logos, icons, or ads. You can configure the size, shape, position, and which devices to show it on.

I wrote a complete Pinterest traffic guide covering how I set this up alongside a broader Pinterest strategy.

Free vs Pro: The free version handles button display with all the smart filtering options. Pro ($29/year) adds pin analytics, custom button colors, A/B testing, UTM tracking, advanced exclude rules, and per-post toggling.

Affiliate Buffet — Amazon Affiliate Toolkit

The problem: Amazon's Product Advertising API sunsets on April 30, 2026, and every existing affiliate plugin that relies on it is about to break — frozen prices, stale stock badges, broken comparison tables. On top of that, the day-to-day work of running an Amazon-affiliate site (tagging, displaying products, FTC disclosure, link health) is split across four or five separate plugins that don't talk to each other.

A few of my sites — Acuario Pets, in particular — earn through Amazon Associates. As the PA-API deadline got closer, I needed something that didn't depend on it for the day-one functionality and that could integrate Amazon's official replacement (the Creators API) for the heavier-traffic posts.

Affiliate Buffet bundles five modules: Keyword Linker (auto-link product keywords across articles), Product Block (Gutenberg block for clean Amazon product cards), Auto-Tagger (rewrite every Amazon URL on the site to use your tag), FTC Disclosure (auto-inject compliance notice on posts with affiliate links), and Link Health Checker (find dead and untagged Amazon links). It also ships with a built-in click analytics dashboard that captures more reliable outbound-click data than Google Analytics. I covered the full breakdown in my Amazon affiliate toolkit post.

Free vs Pro: The free version includes all five modules, the click analytics dashboard, and per-marketplace tag management for ten Amazon marketplaces. Pro ($29/year) integrates Amazon's Creators API for live price + stock + brand data, removes module limits, and adds CSV export for click analytics. The PA-API migration post covers what's changing and who qualifies.

Connect My Site to AI — MCP Server

The problem: AI tools couldn't interact with my live WordPress sites. Every audit, every bulk operation required manual copy-pasting between Claude and WordPress.

This plugin turns your WordPress site into an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. That means AI tools like Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor can connect directly to your site and work with your content — search posts, audit SEO, analyze internal links, and with Pro, actually make changes.

I use this on all 12 of my sites. The workflow I described in my MCP guide — auditing, finding internal link opportunities, and applying fixes — would take hours manually. With MCP, it's a conversation.

Free vs Pro: The free version includes 24 read-only tools covering content search, SEO auditing, internal link analysis, media browsing, and technical health checks. Pro ($49/year) adds 21 write tools for content management, bulk operations, redirect management, and taxonomy cleanup.

How They Work Together

The four plugins address different parts of running content sites at scale:

• ScanMyPosts finds the problems — broken content, thin articles, dead links, missing images. It's the diagnostic layer.
• Always Visible Pin It Button drives traffic from Pinterest — one of the most valuable non-Google traffic sources for visual content sites. It's the growth layer.
• Affiliate Buffet handles the monetization for sites that earn through Amazon Associates — keyword linking, product blocks, FTC disclosure, link health. It's the revenue layer.
• Connect My Site to AI handles operations — bulk updates, internal linking, SEO fixes, content management. It's the management layer.

A typical workflow looks like this: ScanMyPosts identifies 15 articles missing meta descriptions. Connect My Site to AI generates and applies optimized meta descriptions across all 15 in one conversation. Always Visible Pin It Button is silently driving Pinterest traffic to the articles that have strong visual content. And on the Amazon-monetized sites, Affiliate Buffet's Auto-Tagger ensures every product link earns commission and the Click Analytics dashboard surfaces which posts are actually converting.

None of this is revolutionary individually. But the compound effect of having diagnostics, growth, and management tooling all working together is what makes running 12 sites actually manageable.

A Real Week With All Three

Let me walk through what a typical maintenance week looks like across my 12 sites, using all three plugins together.

Monday — Audit day. I open ScanMyPosts on whichever site is due for review (I rotate through all 12 on a quarterly cycle). I run the thin content scan, broken shortcode scan, and external link scan. This takes about 5 minutes per site — click the scan button, wait for results, review the flagged items. Last week on Acuario Pets, I found 4 articles under 600 words and 2 broken shortcodes from a table plugin I removed months ago.

Tuesday — Fix day. I connect Claude to the site via Connect My Site to AI and work through the audit results. For the thin articles, I ask Claude to analyze the competing content and help me expand them to match. For the broken shortcodes, ScanMyPosts Pro removed them in one click. For the dead external links, Claude found replacement URLs and updated them. This used to take a full day. Now it takes about an hour.

Wednesday — Internal linking. This is where Connect My Site to AI really shines. I ask Claude to map the internal link structure for a specific category — say, all turtle diet articles on The Turtle Hub. It finds which articles should link to each other but don't, suggests specific anchor text and placement, and applies the links with my approval. I covered this internal linking strategy in detail in my MCP guide.

Thursday — Pinterest check. I review the pin analytics from Always Visible Pin It Button Pro to see which images are getting the most clicks. If certain posts are driving Pinterest traffic, I create additional pin-worthy images for those posts — different angles, different text overlays. My Pinterest strategy guide explains this in detail, but the short version is: double down on what's already working.

Thursday afternoon — Affiliate review. On the Amazon-monetized sites, I open Affiliate Buffet's Click Analytics dashboard and look at the top ASINs and CTAs by click volume. I run the Link Health Checker monthly to flag any discontinued products before readers hit a 404. If the Pinterest data showed a post is suddenly trending, I cross-reference it against affiliate clicks — sometimes a Pinterest-driven post needs a Product Block update or a fresh round of FTC-compliant disclosure tweaks. The Affiliate Buffet toolkit overview walks through this in more detail.

Friday — New content. With the maintenance handled, Friday is for writing new articles. The audit results from Monday often reveal content gaps — topics my competitors cover that I don't, or thin articles that could become comprehensive guides with a full rewrite.

This rhythm keeps all 12 sites healthy without any single site consuming my entire week. The plugins handle the scale problem — they turn 12 sites worth of manual work into a structured, repeatable workflow.

Why I Built Instead of Buying

For each plugin, I tried existing solutions first. Here's what was missing:

• Content auditing plugins: Most focus on one type of scan (broken links OR shortcodes OR thin content). I needed all seven in one place with a unified dashboard. I also needed it to be read-only — no accidental modifications. The few comprehensive options I found were bloated WordPress admin page builders with 50 features where I needed 7.
• Pinterest plugins: Every single one I tested used hover-only buttons. Some were also bloated with 15+ features I didn't need, adding kilobytes of frontend JavaScript. Mine does one thing — the button — and does it well on every device. The codebase is under 50KB. No external API calls. No tracking scripts.
• AI integration: Nothing existed. MCP is still relatively new, and no one had built a WordPress plugin for it. I needed to connect Claude to my sites, so I built the bridge. The OAuth 2.0 implementation alone took a few weeks to get right — it had to be secure enough that I'd trust it on my own production sites.
• Amazon affiliate plugins: Most existing options (AAWP, Lasso, AmaLinks Pro) are competent at one or two things and weak at the rest. None of them auto-inject FTC disclosures, none of them scan existing content for untagged Amazon URLs, and most rely entirely on PA-API — which sunsets April 30, 2026. I needed something modular with a working Creators API path built in, so I built Affiliate Buffet to bundle the five jobs of an affiliate site into one plugin with one shared tag config.

The common thread is that I built tools to solve problems I was actually facing while running my portfolio of content sites. They're not theoretical — they're battle-tested across 12 sites and 1,000+ articles.

What's Next

I'm actively developing all four plugins. ScanMyPosts will get a content readability scanner and duplicate content detection. Always Visible Pin It Button is getting rich pin support and scheduled pin analytics digests. Affiliate Buffet's biggest near-term work is hardening the Creators API integration ahead of the April 30 PA-API cutoff. Connect My Site to AI will expand to support more AI tools as the MCP ecosystem grows — Windsurf, JetBrains AI, and others are adding MCP support.

The broader vision is a complete WordPress management toolkit that combines auditing, optimization, monetization, and AI-powered operations. Right now they're four separate plugins. Eventually, they might work together even more tightly — imagine ScanMyPosts detecting an issue and Connect My Site to AI automatically fixing it, with a human approval step in between, while Affiliate Buffet's Click Analytics surfaces which posts are revenue-critical and need attention first.

But that's future thinking. Right now, each plugin solves a specific problem well, and that's enough.

Get Started

All four plugins have free versions with full core functionality. You can download them directly from the plugins page and start using them today. Pro upgrades are available when you need the advanced features.

• ScanMyPosts — 7 content scanners, free. Pro: $29/year.
• Always Visible Pin It Button — Mobile-friendly Pin It button, free. Pro: $29/year.
• Affiliate Buffet — 5-module Amazon affiliate toolkit + click analytics, free. Pro: $29/year.
• Connect My Site to AI — 24 AI-powered tools, free. Pro: $49/year.

If you're running WordPress content sites and want to see how these tools fit into a broader strategy, start with the guides I've written for each one: the content audit guide, the Pinterest traffic guide, the Amazon affiliate toolkit overview, and the MCP setup guide. They'll give you the full picture of how each tool fits into a content management workflow.

On the MCP side specifically, two more reads worth pinning: how Connect My Site to AI compares to other WordPress MCP servers (Automattic's official adapter, WordPress.com's built-in, Royal MCP, and the rest), and the WordPress MCP troubleshooting guide for when Claude doesn't see your tools or write operations 401.