External News Importer documentation

Overview

External News Importer turns article links into posts on your site: each post gets the article’s title, image and date, and sends readers to the original story.

Where to find it: News Importer, in the main WordPress menu.

What you need

• WordPress 6.2 or newer
• PHP 7.4 or newer

Install

1. With The Vault (easiest): open The Vault in your WordPress menu, find External News Importer and click Install. It is installed and activated for you.
2. By hand: download it free from the plugin page, then go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip and activate it.

Updates arrive automatically from wpwizards.com, like plugins from WordPress.org.

Quick start

1. Paste the links. Open News Importer and paste one article URL per line (up to 100 at a time). You can put a date in front of a link if you want to set one yourself.
2. Choose a category. Pick the category, and a subcategory if you use them (for example Press → TV). Save it as the default so you only do this once.
3. Import. Each link becomes a post with the article’s share title and share image. Visiting the post redirects to the original article.

Publish dates

The importer reads the article’s own publish date from the page and uses it, so your press page sorts in the order the coverage ran. If an article does not publish a date, the date you typed (or today) is used.

To re-read the date for a post that is already imported, hover it under Posts and click Use original publish date.

Featured images

Each post uses the image the publication set for sharing. Imported images in your chosen category stay locked to the source image, and you can re-fetch it with one click if the publication changes it.

Import log

Every imported article is listed in the log with links to the post and to the source, so you can find and fix an item quickly.

Showing the posts

Imported items are normal posts in the category you chose. Show them with your theme’s blog module, a category archive, or any posts grid. Clicking one takes the reader to the original article.

Troubleshooting and questions

A post imported without an image.

The article did not provide a share image, or the site blocked the request. Add a featured image by hand, or try the re-fetch link later.

The title is wrong.

The importer uses the title the publication set for sharing. Edit the post title like any other post.

Does it copy the article text?

No. Only the title, image and date are stored, and the post redirects to the original.

Can I stop a post redirecting?

Remove the source link from the post and it behaves like a normal post.

Get help

Stuck on something this page does not cover? Contact us and tell us which plugin and version you are on. Need it to do something it does not do yet? We build custom plugins too.